Foster Provost

Foster is a Professor and NEC Faculty Fellow at the NYU Stern School of Business and a Paduano Fellow in business ethics. His research and teaching focuses on data mining, machine learning, network analysis, and social-network marketing. He previously was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Machine Learning and Program Chair of the ACM KDD conference. Professor Provost’s research, which has been the basis for several NYC-based startups, focuses on data science—especially predictive modeling based on consumer behavior data for marketing and advertising applications, and the application of micro-outsourcing systems (e.g. Mechanical Turk) to enhance predictive modeling. Previously, he studied predictive modeling for many business applications including fraud detection, counterterrorism, network diagnosis, and more. Professor Provost’s work has won (among others) IBM Faculty Awards, a President’s Award at NYNEX Science and Technology, Best Paper awards at KDD, including the most recent Best Industry Paper, and the 2009 INFORMS Design Science Award.