The Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) has named SFU computing science professor Jian Pei as the recipient of the 2017 SIGKDD Innovation Award. This is one of the highest awards in the data mining community. Here is the full announcement:

"ACM SIGKDD is pleased to announce that Dr. Jian Pei is the winner of its 2017 Innovation Award.  He is recognized for his seminal contributions to the foundation of data mining and applications, particularly in pattern mining and spatial data mining.  He is a major inventor of several pattern-growth methods, including FP-growth and PrefixSpan, which have been extensively used by industry and adopted by data mining textbooks and open source software toolkits. As one of the most cited authors in data mining, his prolific publications have been cited tens of thousands of times.

The ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award is the highest award for technical excellence in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). It is conferred on one individual or one group of collaborators whose outstanding technical innovations in the KDD field have had a lasting impact in advancing the theory and practice of the field. The contributions must have significantly influenced the direction of research and development of the field or transferred to practice in significant and innovative ways and/or enabled the development of commercial systems."

Pei is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Big Data Science and was recently elected the new chair of SIGKDD. He is also the recipient of the 2015 SIGKDD Service Award.

This is not the first time that the prestigious award has had an SFU connection. The recipient of the 2004 SIGKDD Innovation Award was Pei's PhD supervisor, and former SFU computing science professor, Jiawei Han.

Read the award announcement on SIGKDD's website >>