Welcome!
Dr. Rakesh Agrawal is the President and Founder of the Data Insights Laboratories as well as the President of the Professor Ram Kumar Memorial Foundation. He is also the Rukmini Gopalakrishnachar Visiting Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He also holds a Visiting Professor position at EPFL, Lausanne.
Rakesh is an innovator and thought leader who is driven by the desire to make the world better through scientific breakthroughs and by building practical working systems. He is the recipient of the ACM-SIGKDD Inaugural Innovation Award, ACM-SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM-SIGMOD Test of Time Award (twice), VLDB 10-Yr Most Influential Paper Award, ICDE Most Influential Paper Award, EDBT Test of Time Award, and the Computerworld First Horizon Award. Scientific American named him to its first list of 50 top scientists and technologists. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE.
Until recently, Rakesh was a Microsoft Technical Fellow and headed the Search Labs in Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft in March 2006, Rakesh was an IBM Fellow and led the Quest group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Earlier, he was with the Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill from 1983 to 1989. He also worked for three years at India’s premier company, the Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. He also holds a B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT-Roorkee, and a two-year Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Engineering from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Bombay. Both IIT-Roorkee and NITIE have decorated him with their distinguished alum award.
Rakesh has been granted more than 85 patents. He has published more than 200 research papers, many of them considered seminal. He has written the 1st as well as 2nd highest cited of all papers in the fields of databases and data mining (28th and 36th most cited across all computer science). Wikipedia lists one of his papers as one of the most influential database papers. His papers have been cited more than 100,000 times, with more than 30 of them receiving more than 500 citations each and three of them receiving more than 5000 citations each (Google Scholar). His H-index is 96. He is the most cited author in the field of database systems and the 26th most cited author across all of Computer Science (Citeseer). His research has been featured in N.B.C., New York Times, and several other venues.
It is rare that a researcher’s work creates not only a product, but a whole new industry. IBM’s data mining product, Intelligent Miner, grew straight out of Rakesh’s research. IBM’s introduction of Intelligent Miner and associated services created a new category of software and services. His research has been incorporated into many other commercial products, including DB2 Mining Extender, DB2 OLAP Server, WebSphere Commerce Server, and Microsoft Bing Search engine, as well as many research prototypes and applications.
Rakesh is being increasingly sought to help with studies on topics of national and international interest. He played a key role in 2005 IBM’s study for President of India on Improving India’s Education System through Information Technology. In 2008, he was a key member of the National Academy of Sciences study on Voter Registration Databases. Then, he was the only Computer Scientist in the 2010 National Research Council study on Science and Technology strategies of key countries world-wide. Recently, Rakesh is in dialog with Govt. of India to use his technology for enriching textbooks used by millions of students.