KDD2004: Data Mining and Spam
Pedro Domingos (from UW) presented a paper (co-authored with a number of UWers) about data mining in the presence of an adversary who is deliberately trying to deceive the data miner. This was the big hit of the conference so far. He made the point that this happens in many cases -- spam detection, intrusion detection, counterterrorism, etc -- where there is an adversary who can alter the data to prevent the data miner detecting what he seeks to detect. He argued that this problem has not been addressed before in the data mining field but is interesting and important.