His primary field of research is Data Mining.

His 1994 paper, "Fast algorithms for mining association rules",[2] co-authored with Rakesh Agrawal has acquired over 27000 citations as per Google Scholar[3] as of July 2014, and is thus one of the most cited papers in the area of Data Mining.

It won the VLDB 10-year award in 2004.

[4] His 1995 paper, Mining Sequential Patterns,[5] also co-authored with Rakesh Agrawal, was awarded the ICDE Influential Paper Award in 2008,[6] and his 2004 paper, Order-Preserving Encryption for Numeric Data,[7] co-authored with Rakesh Agrawal, Jerry Kiernan and Yirong Xu, won the 2014 SIGMOD Test of Time Award.

[10] He was elected to Fellow of ACM (2014) for contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining.