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Michael Welge: Big Data Executive-in-Residence (EIR)
Biographical Sketch
Michael Welge’s professional background includes Director, Data Intensive
Technologies and Applications (DITA) at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications, Affiliate, Division of Biomedical Sciences,
Adjunct Faculty at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), and Co-Director,
National Center for Advanced Data Research (NLADR) at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
In these positions Michael has helped Fortune 100 companies, government
agencies, and academic institutions make sense of the data mining process,
integrated frameworks to support the process, and data mining applications. He has worked in
the fields of data mining, mathematical modeling, and programming. This work spans a diverse
set of data mining applications dealing with issues such in bio/medical informatics,
environmental engineering, education policy, fraud detection, customer relationship
management, water treatment, business intelligence, telecommunications, risk management and
crisis management. His work includes algorithm design and development for the data mining
environment D2K. (http://alg.ncsa.uiuc.edu , http://dita.ncsa.uiuc.edu) supporting all phases of
the data mining process. D2K was designed to provide data mining professionals with a flexible
and extensible architecture or “sandbox” for developing and evaluating the performance,
accuracy, and relevance of a range of data mining techniques on a variety of data sets. Currently,
Michael is PI on a Mellon Foundation Grant to develop cyberInfrastructure to support scholarly
research for Humanities (http://sessr.org).
Michael is frequently an invited industry lecturer and has presented briefing and courses on
data mining to the NSF Alliance, DOD and State of Illinois. He was awarded the multiple
Industrial Grand Challenge awards for his work in the area of data mining with Motorola, Sears,
Caterpillar and Allstate. Along with his team, Michael was the recipient of University of Illinois
Innovative Technology Award.
Michael is founder of two University of Illinois economic development spin-outs – RiverGlass
(http://riverglassinc.com) and One Llama (http://onellama.com), which were both incubated in
the Research Park at EntepriseWorks.