Mohammed Zaki, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor and head of the Department of Computer Science, has been named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow. AAAS fellows are elected annually to recognize their extraordinary achievements in research, teaching, and technology, as well as in communicating science to the public. Election as an AAAS fellow is considered a lifetime honor. Past Fellows have included luminaries like Thomas Edison, W.E.B Dubois, Grace Hopper, Ellen Ochoa, Herbert Simon, and Steven Chu. 

Zaki is being recognized for his distinguished contributions to the fields of data mining and machine learning, and for service to the academic community.

“It is a great honor for me to be elected as an AAAS Fellow,” Zaki said. “AAAS is the preeminent organization devoted to advancing science and serving society, which are both very important aspects, given the rapid advances in AI, machine learning, and data mining that are poised for outsized impact in our lives these days.”

Zaki’s expertise is in developing novel data mining and machine learning techniques, particularly for learning from graph structured and textual data, with applications in bioinformatics, personal health, and financial analytics. His nearly 300 publications include the Data Mining and Machine Learning textbook (2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2020) and he holds six patents. Zaki is currently an associate editor for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. He has co-chaired all of the major conferences in data mining and recently co-chaired the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management ’22. He serves on the executive board of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

Zaki’s research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Energy (DOE), IBM, Google, HP, and Nvidia. He was a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the DOE Early Career Principal Investigator Award, the HP Innovation Research Award, and a Google Faculty Research Award. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Zaki has been a Rensselaer faculty member since 1998 and a professor since 2009. Previously, he served as the associate department head and graduate program director for the Department of Computer Science. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester.

“Professor Zaki is not only a world leader in the area of data mining and machine learning but he has also emerged as a strong leader within the Department of Computer Science,” said Curt Breneman, Dean of the Rensselaer School of Science. “We are all very proud of his well-deserved selection as an AAAS Fellow.”