Rakesh Agrawal

Rakesh Agrawal is a computer scientist best known for foundational data-mining work, including the association-rule papers of 1993 and 1994. He earned his MS and PhD in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1983 and worked at Bell Laboratories until 1989. At IBM Almaden, he led the Quest group as an IBM Fellow, and his team developed the Intelligent Miner product. He received the first ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award in 2000, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006, and joined Microsoft in March 2006 as a Technical Fellow in the Search Labs. He is President and Founder of Data Insights Laboratories, where he works on electronic education and privacy in data science, and in 2025 he received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Wisconsin.

Now at: Data Insights Laboratories
Works: 165
Citations: 72,027
h-index: 61
Badges: Founder
Bridge

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

1979–1989

Wisconsin degrees, then Bell Labs

He holds a B.E. in electronics and communication engineering from IIT-Roorkee. His studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison begin in 1979, and he earns his MS and PhD in computer sciences there in 1983. From 1983 to 1989, he works at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill.
1993–1994

Association rule papers

In 1993, he coauthors "Mining Association Rules Between Sets of Items in Large Databases" with Tomasz Imieliński and Arun Swami at IBM, presenting an algorithm that generates all significant association rules between items in a database of customer transactions. In 1994, he and Ramakrishnan Srikant publish "Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules" at VLDB.
2000

The first SIGKDD Innovation Award

In 2000, he receives the first ACM SIGKDD Award for Innovation, cited for research contributions that include work on association rules and mining sequences. He is also the 2000 recipient of ACM SIGMOD's Innovations Award, which is renamed the Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2004.
By 2006

Quest group and Intelligent Miner

As an IBM Fellow, he leads the Quest group at the IBM Almaden Research Center until 2006. His team develops Intelligent Miner, IBM's first commercial data-mining product.
2006

National Academy of Engineering

In 2006, while an IBM Fellow and senior manager at IBM Almaden, he is elected to the National Academy of Engineering for the development of techniques for extracting information from very large databases.
March 2006

Technical Fellow at Microsoft

He leaves IBM and joins Microsoft in March 2006 as a Technical Fellow in the Search Labs. By 2014, he heads the Search Labs in Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley.
2025

Wisconsin Distinguished Alumni Award

In 2025, he receives a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association, alongside Jeffrey Sprecher and Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
As of October 2026

Founder of Data Insights Laboratories

He is President and Founder of Data Insights Laboratories. In 2025, he works on electronic education, using data analytics to improve learning, and speaks on the need for privacy in data science.