Biographical sketches of authors

Ricardo Vilalta   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York, 10598 (electronic mail: vilalta@us.ibm.com). Dr. Vilalta received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998. His interests lie in machine learning, pattern recognition, neural nets, data mining, and artificial intelligence. His research is centered on applying meta-knowledge to improve the performance of learning algorithms. His current work at IBM involves the development of data analysis techniques for computer-problem determination.

Chidanand V. Apte   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: apte@us.ibm.com). Dr. Apte manages the Data Abstraction Research group at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Rutgers University in 1984. His research interests include knowledge discovery and data mining, applied machine learning and statistical modeling, and business intelligence automation.

Joseph L. Hellerstein   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: hellers@us.ibm.com). Dr. Hellerstein manages the Systems Management Research Department with projects such as event mining, event prediction, intelligent probing, automated diagnosis, and generic adaptive control. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1984. He has taught at Columbia University and has published approximately 70 papers.

Sheng Ma   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: shengma@us.ibm.com). Dr. Ma received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 1992. He received M.S. and Ph.D. (with honors) degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1995 and 1998, respectively. He joined the Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member in 1998, where he is now manager of the Machine Learning for Systems Department. His current research interests include network and computer system management, machine learning, data mining, and network traffic modeling and control.

Sholom M. Weiss   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: sholom@us.ibm.com). Dr. Weiss is a research staff member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Prior to joining IBM, he was a professor of computer science at Rutgers University. He is an author or coauthor of numerous papers on artificial intelligence and machine learning, including Predictive Data Mining: A Practical Guide, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers in 1997. His current research focuses on innovative methods in data mining. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and serves on numerous editorial boards.