KDnuggets

Gregory I. Piatetsky-Shapiro (born 7 April 1958) is a data scientist, co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and President of a site providing Business Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Science. For simplicity, he usually abbreviates his name as Gregory Piatetsky.

Piatetsky was born to a Jewish-Russian family in Moscow, Russia. His father, Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro, was a well-known mathematician. He was admitted in 1970 to the Physics-Mathematics School N. 2 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 a MS (1979) and Ph.D. (1984) at NYU Courant Institute. His first paper, published in SIGMOD in 1984, proved that secondary index selection is NP-complete by reducing it to 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 getting his Ph.D. in 1985, he joined GTE Laboratories in 1985, 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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