Dr. Kumar has made many significant contributions to the field of data mining, thru service, research, publication, and software.
Kumar is one of the founders of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, and serves as co-chair of its steering committee. He also served as chair/co-chair for many conferences/workshops in the area of data mining, including IEEE ICDM 2002, and SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (2001). He is a member of the steering committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining and the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine.
Kumar is a founding co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, editor-in-chief of IEEE Intelligent Informatics Bulletin, and editor of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Book Series published by CRC Press/Chapman Hall. Kumar also serves or has served on the editorial boards of many leading journals in the field, including Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge and Information Systems, and IEEE Transactions of Data and Knowledge Engineering.
Dr. Kumar has published over 200 research articles, many of them in the field of data mining, and has authored/co-authored 9 books, including a widely used text book "Introduction to Data Mining".
Kumar promoted data mining through developing software packages and novel data mining algorithms. He developed data mining techniques for analyzing massive scientific data sets, novel graph-based algorithms for clustering high-dimensional data, predictive models for identifying rare events, and techniques for mining spatio-temporal data. Kumar's data mining techniques have been used by NASA scientists for the discovery of patterns in the global climate system and connections of the ocean climate to the global carbon cycle.
Kumar received the 2005 IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award for contributions to the design and analysis of parallel algorithms, graph-partitioning, and data mining. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS, and a member of SIAM.
2008 IEEE ICDM Nomination and Evaluation Committees