He is a co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

He spent most of his life in the U.S., having received his undergraduate and graduate education in Ann Arbor, MI at the University of Michigan.

Fayyad has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of data mining, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and databases.

From 1989 to 1996 Fayyad held a leadership role at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where his work in the analysis and exploration of Big Data in scientific applications (gathered from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and spacecraft) garnered him the top research excellence award that Caltech awards to JPL scientists – The Lew Allen Award for Excellence in Research, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

In 2008, Fayyad founded Open Insights, LLC, a technology and consulting firm based in Bellevue, WA.

[9] In 2014 he became chief data officer and group managing director at Barclays PLC, leaving the firm to pursue other interests in early March 2016; he is executive chairman of Oasis 500.

[citation needed] Prior to Barclays he served as chairman, co-founder and CTO of ChoozOn Corporation —a mobile and web search engine service under the brand Blue Kangaroo.

[citation needed] In 1995 Fayyad (with Ramasamy Uthurusamy) co-organized the First International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD-95), held at AAAI-1995 in Montreal, Canada.

[10] A good introductory article on Data Mining can be found in a special invited issue in AI Magazine.

[11] A year later, in 1996, Usama Fayyad launched the journal by Kluwer called Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery as its founding Editor-in-Chief.

Fayyad also organized the last KDD Workshop in 1994 (Seattle, WA) with Ramasamy (Sam) Uthurusamy (PDF file accessible at AAAI website) and the help of Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and transformed the workshops into an annual international conference on Data Mining.

Fayyad has 4 children and now lives in Boston while he continues as chairman of Oasis500 in Jordan and is an investor in several companies in the U.S. and Europe.