Dr. Usama Fayyad is Yahoo!'s chief data officer and senior vice president of the Strategic Data Solutions group. Fayyad is responsible for Yahoo!'s overall data strategy, architecting Yahoo!'s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the Company's data processing infrastructure and analysis. The analysis and management of data within Fayyad's group enables Yahoo! to ensure customer satisfaction and develop innovative products and services that are essential to consumers' lives. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting company. In early 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of digiMine Inc. (now Revenue Science, Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company that built, operated and hosted data warehouses and analytics for some of the world's largest enterprises in online publishing, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services.

Fayyad's professional experience also includes five years spent leading the data mining and
exploration group at Microsoft Research and building the data mining products for
Microsoft's server division. From 1989 to 1996 Fayyad held a leadership role at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where his work in the analysis and exploration
of scientific databases gathered from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and
spacecraft garnered him the top research excellence award that Caltech awards to JPL
scientists, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan (1991), and
also holds BSE's in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); an MSE in computer
science and engineering (1986); and an M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). He has published over
100 technical articles on the field of data mining, edited two influential books on the
subject and launched the primary scientific journal in the field while serving as
editor-in-chief. Fayyad also launched and edited the primary newsletter in the technical
community, and regularly delivers addresses and keynotes at government, industry and
academic conferences around the world.