Gary M. Weiss

I am a Professor of Computer and Information Science at Fordham University. From 1985 until 2004 I worked at AT&T Bell Labs, first as a software engineer and expert system developer on telephone switching systems, and then as a data scientist applying machine learning methods to business and marketing problems. I joined Fordham University in 2004. I received my B.S. degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, M.S. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and doctorate in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

My general research area is data mining and machine learning and I have over one-hundred research publications in these areas. My current research focuses on Educational Data Mining (EDM) and I currently co-direct the EDM lab with two colleagues. We have investigated interesting topics such as: how to assess instructors objectively based on future performance of their students, mining course sequences and their impact on educational outcomes, identifying gender and culture bias in graduate letters of recommedation, and detecting Chat-GPT generated admissions materials. As of the fall 2023 our most active research projects involve identifying patterns in student grades and detecting AI-generated admissions and other academic documents.

My research from 1998 to 2010 focused on handling real-world issues, such as class imbalance, that make learning difficult. Then from 2010 to 2020 I focused on learning about users from their smartphone and smartwatch sensor data. I established the Wireless Sensor Data Mining (WISDM) Lab with support from a National Science Foundation grant and developed a smartphone app to identify a user's physical activity in real-time. This research was also extended to include behavioral biometrics, so that a user could be identified based on their physical movements.

Students interested in research can contact me about research opportunities. I am interested in working with undergraduate, MS, and PhD students. Feel free to review my recent publications. I am also the director of Fordham's MS in Computer Science program; interested students can contact me for more information.


New and Notable

In the News


Fun Facts

I can trace my academic lineage back to (and past) Copernicus (the hard lifting was done by my advisor, Haym Hirsh).

My Erdös number is 2: Paul Erdös to Frank Hsu to Gary Weiss.

My Erdös-Bacon number, on the other hand, is infinite, and is likely to remain so.


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