Gary Weiss' Picture Gary Weiss
Assistant Professor
Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Computer & Information Sciences
Fordham University
332 John Mulcahy Hall
441 East Fordham Road, Bronx NY 10458
Email: gweiss(at)cis.fordham.edu
Phone: 718-817-0785

Bio

Gary Weiss is an assistant professor of Computer and Information Science at Fordham University. Prior to this, he spent many years at AT&T Bell Labs and then AT&T Labs. During his time at AT&T, Dr. Weiss worked as a software engineer designing telephone switching software, before moving on to expert system development, and, finally, data mining. Dr. Weiss spent his final five years at AT&T in a marketing analysis group applying data mining methods to solve complex business problems.

Dr. Weiss completed his undergraduate education at Cornell University, where he received his B.S. degree in Computer Science. He earned his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University. Dr. Weiss has published numerous papers in the areas of machine learning, data mining, expert systems and object-oriented programming. He is considered an expert in the use of data mining in the telecommunications domain.

Research

My primary research area is machine learning/data mining. Machine learning stives to automatically improve the performance of a system over time, as experience is accumulated, whereas the related area of data mining is interested in extracting useful knowledge from large amounts of data. In general, I am interested in studying how we can deal with many of the real-world issues that make learning, and data mining, more difficult. My recent work has focused on how class distribution affects data mining and how one might be able to choose data intelligently when data is costly, to improve the effectiveness of data mining. I have also studied the problem of why it is so difficult to deal with rare cases and rare classes in data mining. I recently helped organize the Second ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Utility-Based Data Mining and am in the process of editing a special issue on Utility-Based Data Mining of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal. I am also director of the Fordham Data Mining research group.

I have also conducted research in a few other areas, during my time in industry. This includes research in expert systems (case-based and rule-based) and in object technology. I helped develop an rule-based object-oriented expert system for maintaining telephone switching systems which received a AAAI Innovative Application for Artificial Intelligence award.

For more on my research, please visit my research page.

Teaching

My office hours for the Spring 2006 semester are Monday and Thursday from 9-10am, 11:15-12, and 1:30-2:30. Below are some of the courses I have taught within the last 2 years (often linked to the course syllabi).

Interesting Items

I can trace my academic lineage (through dissertation advisors) back to Otto Mencken in the 1600's. Thanks to the work of my advisor, Haym Hirsh, very little effort was required on my part. The Mathematics Genealogy Project provides an additional path and according to them acadamic ancestors include: Poisson, Lagrange, Euler, Bernoulli and Leibniz (and yes, the project considers computer scientists to be mathematicians).

Favorite quote: "In God we trust. All others must have data." Rick Peterson, Mets' pitching coach (quoted in New York Times, Jun 13, 2004).

 
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