Prof. Vipin Kumar is recognized for his technical contributions to foundational research in data mining as well as its applications to mining scientific data. Prof. Kumar has made numerous significant and impactful contributions to a wide range of core data mining areas including graph partitioning, clustering, association analysis, high performance and parallel data mining, anomaly/change detection and data driven discovery methods for analyzing global climate and ecosystem data. Many of his papers on these topics are amongst the most highly cited papers in data mining.

Prof. Kumar is also well-known for his pioneering research in the areas of high performance and parallel data mining. In particular, his group was amongst the first ones to introduce the concepts of dynamic load balancing (derived from his earlier extensive work on the design of scalable parallel algorithms for unstructured problems) to the parallel formulations of algorithms such as Apriori and decision tree induction.

Prof. Kumar received the B.E. in Electronics & Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee , India , the M.E. in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute, Eindhoven , Netherlands , and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park.

He is currently William Norris Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota . Prof. Kumar is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, and a recipient of the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland College Park, the ICDM 2008 Outstanding Service Award, and the 2005 IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award.