Vipin Kumar, the William Norris Professor and head of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, will receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) 2012 Innovation Award at the opening plenary of the 18th international ACM SIGKDD Conference next Sunday in Beijing, China. Since 2000, the annual award has been “conferred on one individual or one group of collaborators whose outstanding technical innovations in the KDD field have had a lasting impact on advancing the theory and practice of the field.” According to SIGKDD, the citation for Vipin’s award reads as follows (after the jump):

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) — a non-partisan, Washington, DC-based think tank that aims to formulate and promote public policies to advance technological innovation and productivity globally — has released a short report calling for a R&D roadmap for privacy, together with a companion website enabling researchers to openly collaborate on creating a privacy research agenda. Noting that “effectively addressing privacy concerns … will require a mix of new technologies and policies to ensure data is properly safeguarded and consumers are protected,” the report emphasizes that a roadmap would “help address consumer privacy concerns, better align R&D investments with strategic objectives, and enable more innovation.” According to the report (following the link):