Gregory I. Piatetsky-Shapiro

Gregory I. Piatetsky-Shapiro (born 7 April 1958) is a data scientist and the co-founder of the KDD conference and the Association for Computing Machinery SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is also the founder, president, and current editor of KDnuggets.com, a website for learning and discussion on the areas of Business Analytics, Data Mining and Data Science.

Jewish-Russian Gregory Piatetsky was born in Moscow, Russia to Inna Piatetski and Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro, a well-known mathematician. He was admitted in 1970 to the Physics-Mathematics School, one of the most prestigious schools in Moscow.

In March 1974, Piatetsky emigrated to Israel with his mother, Inna. There, he studied mathematics at Tel-Aviv University and computer science for one semester at Technion. He then received an MS (1979) and Ph.D. (1984) from NYU Courant Institute. In 1984, his first paper, published in SIGMOD, proved that secondary index selection is NP-complete by reducing it to a set cover problem. However, in his dissertation, he proved that the greedy method for set cover has a lower bound of 1 - 1/e ~ 63% of the optimal.

After gaining his PhD in 1984, he joined GTE Laboratories, where he worked on intelligent interfaces to databases. In 1989, he proposed a new project at GTE called "Knowledge Discovery in Databases." The project created a number of advanced prototypes, including KEFIR (Key Findings Reporter), a system for analysis and summarization of key changes in large databases, which was a forerunner of systems like Google Analytics Intelligence. A KEFIR prototype was applied to GTE health care data and received GTE's highest technical award.

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