Usama Fayyad

Leading AI strategy at Northeastern

Usama Fayyad is Senior Vice Provost for AI and Data Strategy and Senior Advisor to the President at Northeastern University, and a professor of the practice in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He joined Northeastern in 2020 as the inaugural director of the Institute for Experiential AI, which Northeastern says he helped found, and the Institute's page still lists him as founding executive director.^[1][2]

He continues as chairman of Open Insights, the technology and consulting firm he founded in 2008 after leaving Yahoo, which focuses on data strategy and AI and machine learning solutions.^[1][2]

Education and NASA JPL

Fayyad earned bachelor's degrees in electrical and computer engineering, a master's in computer engineering, a master's in mathematics and a doctorate in computer science and engineering, all at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He founded the Machine Learning Systems Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1992. Wikipedia describes his JPL work on large datasets from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and spacecraft, and lists a NASA medal and Caltech's Lew Allen Award, though it marks those honors as lacking citations.^[1][3]

Building the data mining field

Wikipedia reports that he organized a 1994 knowledge discovery workshop in Seattle that grew into the annual KDD conference, and co-organized the first full conference, KDD-95 in Montreal, with Ramasamy Uthurusamy. He was founding editor-in-chief of the journal Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in 1996, launched SIGKDD Explorations, directed the ACM SIGKDD from 2001 to 2009 and chaired its executive committee from 2009 to 2013.^[3]

Wikipedia lists him as editor of the 1996 book Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and a 2002 volume on information visualization in data mining. Northeastern lists more than 100 technical articles and more than 20 patents, and Fayyad is a Fellow of both the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. Wikipedia says he received the SIGKDD Service Award in 2003 and its Innovation Award in 2007.^[1][3]

Microsoft, startups and Yahoo

In 1997 he founded the Data Mining and Exploration Group at Microsoft Research, and Hallmark's profile of him notes five years at Microsoft working on AI and data mining. He then co-founded two Seattle startups. Northeastern says Yahoo acquired the second in 2003, whereas Wikipedia dates the acquisition of DMX Group to 2004; either way, Fayyad became Yahoo's chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions, a title Northeastern and Hallmark both describe as the first of its kind in the industry, and founded Yahoo Research Labs.^[1][3][4]

Barclays and OODA Health

From 2013 to 2016, according to Northeastern, he was global chief data officer and group managing director at Barclays Bank in London, the first person to hold that role there. From 2017 to 2019 he was co-founder and chief technology officer of OODA Health, which Cedar acquired in 2021.^[1][4]

Recent news: Hallmark board

On May 20, 2026, Hallmark Health Care Solutions of Charlestown, Massachusetts announced Fayyad's appointment to its board of directors. Hallmark describes itself as a workforce intelligence and enablement provider serving more than 50 health systems. Its chief executive, Bharat Sundaram, called Fayyad one of the most respected and influential leaders in AI, machine learning and enterprise data strategy.^[4]

Advisory roles

Northeastern says he serves on public and private company boards, was an adviser to the World Economic Forum's Global Center for Cybersecurity, and is an angel investor and adviser to early-stage technology startups in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.^[1][2]

Why he matters

Fayyad's career follows the arc of the discipline itself: from scientific data analysis at NASA to the academic field of data mining, to the first chief data officer role in a major internet company, to AI governance and strategy in a research university. The chief data officer title he held at Yahoo has since become a standard seat in large enterprises, and his work through KDD and its journals helped define how a generation of data scientists were trained and published.^[1][3][4]

On The Executive List

Usama Fayyad is ranked No. 16 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Data Officers discipline. The Executive List edition records him as chief data officer and founder of Open Insights; he is now Senior Vice Provost for AI and Data Strategy at Northeastern and remains chairman of Open Insights. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.