Dr. Usama Fayyad is Yahoo!'s chief data officer and executive vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions. Fayyad is responsible for Yahoo!'s overall data strategy, architecting Yahoo!'s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the Company's data analytics and data processing infrastructure.  He also founded and currently oversees the Yahoo! Research organization globally. Fayyad founded Yahoo! Research and hired its key management with the aim of building the premier scientific research organization to develop the new sciences of the Internet, on-line marketing, and innovative interactive applications.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy and technology company. DMX Group addressed large-scale challenging data mining problems and projects for some of the world’s largest companies in automotive, financial services, telecommunications, and technology companies. Fayyad joined Yahoo!’s senior executive team as part of an acquisition of DMX Group by Yahoo! Inc. in 2004.

In early 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of digiMine Inc. (now Revenue Science, Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company that built, operated and hosted data warehouses and analytics for some of the world's largest enterprises in online publishing, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. As CEO, Fayyad raised over $45 million in venture capital from top VC firms (Mayfield and Mohr Davidow Ventures) and led the growth of the company from 3 employees to over 120 employees. He became Chairman of Revenue Science in June 2003 in order to start the DMX Group business.

Fayyad's professional experience also includes five years spent leading the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and building the data mining products for Microsoft's server division. Fayyad’s work at Microsoft Research including development of innovative data mining algorithms that scaled to very large databases and building up a new research program as well as a new product line for Microsoft.

 From 1989 to 1996 Fayyad held a leadership role at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where his work in the analysis and exploration of scientific databases gathered from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and spacecraft garnered him the top research excellence award that Caltech awards to JPL scientists, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991), and also holds BSE's in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); MSE in computer science and engineering (1986); and M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). He has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of data mining, Artificial Intelligence and Database Systems, and holds over 20 patents. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), has edited two influential books on the data mining and launched and served as editor-in-chief of both the primary scientific journal in the field and the primary newsletter in the technical community published by the ACM. He is active in the academic community and holds adjunct professor positions in Australia and Hong Kong. He regularly delivers keynotes and talks at government, industry and academic conferences around the world.