Professor Geoff Webb honoured with prestigious IEEE ICDM award
Globally acclaimed data scientist Professor Geoff Webb from Monash University's Faculty of Information Technology has received the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) Research Contributions Award, the highest honour for achievements in data mining research.
‘It’s humbling to have my work acknowledged by peers in a field that continues to evolve and offer exciting opportunities for innovation,’ said Professor Webb, Director of Research of the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
This accolade accompanies Professor Webb being named Australia’s top researcher in 'Data Mining & Analysis' by The Australian’s 2025 Research Magazine along with four other IT academics at Monash deemed leaders of their fields nationally.
Professor Webb’s research centres on using data to drive evidence-based decision-making, with significant contributions spanning artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, big data and data analytics.
In the 1980s, he developed foundational methods for support-confidence association discovery and the OPUS search algorithm, which remains a benchmark in rule search. He has also led pioneering research in black-box user modelling, interactive data analytics and statistically-grounded pattern discovery, alongside creating widely-adopted machine learning algorithms.
Professor Webb’s practical contributions include the development of Magnum Opus, a commercial data mining software that integrates his innovations. He has also made significant contributions to the widely used machine learning workbench, Weka.
He is the only Australian to have chaired the Program Committees of two leading global data mining conferences: IEEE ICDM and the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
From 2005 to 2014, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and has received numerous awards for his research and service.
Professor Webb has a long association with the IEEE ICDM community, being named an IEEE Fellow in 2015 following receiving the Outstanding Service Award in 2013 for his contributions to the field.
The award ceremony took place on 11 December during the 24th IEEE ICDM, currently being held in Abu Dhabi from 9 to 12 December.