Usama came to the U.S. to earn his PhD in data mining, now perhaps the most coveted expertise for anyone in the web business.

FORBES: The Arab World Needs (Entrepreneurial) Heroes

"The use of text-mining algorithms was critical in this endeavor and helped secure a complete picture that would not have been available using traditional market research, " says Michael Cavaretta, Ford's technical leader for predictive analytics and data mining.

WSJ: How Big Data Is Changing the Whole Equation for Business

Orbitz's chief executive, Barney Harford, has made data mining a priority.

WSJ: On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels

Ricks, 52, a former accounting and finance professor at Duke and Columbia, draws on a research group of 21 analysts and programmers to pick stocks after mining data on 6, 000 companies in the U.S. and twice that number overseas.

FORBES: Revenge of The Nerds

The exercise was also useful in that the data mining class includes both business students and those from the university's engineering department, among them graduate computing student Rosskyn Dsouza, who gained some new commercial insights.

CNN: Doggedly pursuing a business answer