AFOSR Program Manager Receives Web Intelligence Recognition Published April 23, 2009 By Leah Haugen Air Force Office of Scientific Research ARLINGTON, Va. -- Dr. Hiroshi Motoda, program manager with the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (AOARD) -- an international detachment of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) -- has been awarded the 2008 Web Intelligence Consortium Outstanding Contribution Award. The Web Intelligence Consortium, an international, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing worldwide scientific research and industrial development in the field of web intelligence, selects only one person annually for their Outstanding Contribution Award based on his or her technical contribution to web mining-related research. Dr. Motoda, whose focus concerns machine learning and data mining within the area of Artificial Intelligence, was humbled by this recent award. "I was not informed about this beforehand, so it was a big surprise," he said. Dr. Motoda currently serves as a scientific advisor and program manager at AOARD and manages several programs in the areas of machine learning, data mining, social network analysis and web monitoring. For the past decade, he has worked in the development of efficient algorithms to find frequent subgraphs, known to be NP-hard, which Motoda explains as, "A novel theory of scientific discovery, which is to find the first principle from observation data, and integration of knowledge acquisition from human experts and inductive learning from accumulated data." These specific techniques developed by Motoda in social network analysis and the development of efficient algorithms have greatly contributed to and are most applicable to web mining and web intelligence. These advances have been critical in earning Dr. Motoda this prestigious award.