KDnuggets™ News 10:n04, Feb 24

Features

• Poll: Are there concise laws (patterns) in large datasets? - Feb 23, 2010.
  Problems that involve interacting with humans, such as natural language understanding, have not been shown to be solvable by concise, neat formulas like F = ma.
• Poll Results: Data Miner Salary by Region - Feb 23, 2010.
  in US and Europe average salary/income went down in 2010 (presumably due to the recession), while in Asia and Australia they went up.
• Survey: Difficulty and Importance of Various Modeling Steps - Feb 23, 2010.
  There are many steps required to build and deploy a system with a significant machine learning or data mining component. I am interested in how much time is spent per step in developing real systems and the community's opinion of the importance of the various steps.
• Most viewed items for week Feb 7-13 - Feb 21, 2010.
  most viewed news, jobs, positions
• Most viewed items for week Feb 14-20 - Feb 23, 2010.
  most viewed news, jobs, positions

Courses (see also All Courses)

• Learn How Experts Mine Data in Las Vegas or Washington, DC - Feb 23, 2010.
  TMA's vendor-neutral and method-agnostic data mining and predictive analytics course series is scheduled for Apr 12-16 in Las Vegas and Jun 7-11 in Washington, DC
• Need more insight into Web analytics and intelligence? - Feb 23, 2010.
  Learn how to better leverage Web site effectiveness and marketing measurements when you attend Web Analytics and Web Intelligence Using SAS(r)

Software (see also All Software)

• SAS® Text Analytics reveals new insights in stored documents - Feb 22, 2010.
  SAS Text Analytics, now shipping from the leader in business analytics, automates the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information
• Tableau Launches Free Software To Make Data Social - Feb 11, 2010.
  Tableau Public, available for free, lets anyone to easily create interactive visualizations and publish them to blogs, web sites, Twitter feeds or anywhere online; Instead of viewing static charts or tables, Tableau Public lets people answer questions and share data interactively on the web.
• The GATE Way to Open Source Text Analytics - Feb 23, 2010.
  Hamish is benevolent dictator of the GATE team, developers of a highly capable, open-source, text-analysis platform, the General Architecture for Text Engineering.

Jobs (see also All Jobs)

• Scientific Engineer at Rocket Fuel Inc., Redwood Shores, CA - Feb 23, 2010.
  This is a hands-on role perfect for someone who is truly both a scientist and an engineer, and wants to be able to tell their parents that they write code that makes banner ads more relevant and less annoying for web surfers, and more effective for advertisers like BMW, Skype, and Disney.
• Sr. Manager, Analytics at Rocket Fuel Inc., Redwood Shores, CA - Feb 23, 2010.
  The role includes both "inbound" work doing behind-the-scenes studies on the impact of adjusting our bidding or delivery tactics plus "outbound" work analyzing campaign performance and presenting to customers (primarily their agency media buying teams).
• Data Analyst at Ning, Palo Alto, CA - Feb 23, 2010.
  You will play a key role in analyzing the Ning data set and providing relevant site metrics to product, engineering, and executive teams
• Senior Consultant, Analytics (Senior Statistician) at Visible Technologies, Bellevue, WA - Feb 22, 2010.
  We are seeking advanced analytics professionals with a passion for applying their craft to massive web 2.0 datasets and that will help us advance the state of the art in social networking analytics
• Senior Software Development Engineer, Bing at Microsoft, Bellevue, WA - Feb 12, 2010.
  Analyze (including processing) a huge amount of data by using data mining, statistics, and database techniques, trying to measure/understand user experience, system performance, and business health; generate actionable insights for improving search systems, and increasing user satisfaction.
• Senior Applied Researcher, Bing at Microsoft, Bellevue, WA - Feb 12, 2010.
  The Bing Data Mining Team is hiring extremely talented, highly motivated and productive individuals with expertise in the areas of analytics, statistics, machine learning, and data mining.
• Client Analytical Services Analyst at UBS, Weehawken, NJ - Feb 12, 2010.
  consult with internal clients to define, execute and deliver data analytics supporting our business partners targeting and decision making
• Senior Manager, Business Intelligence & Web Analytics at FreshDirect, Long Island City, NY - Feb 12, 2010.
  responsible for proactively leveraging analytical insights from clickstream data to drive site optimization and decision making across the organization.
• Data Mining Analyst at Waterfront International, Toronto, Canada - Feb 12, 2010.
  Waterfront International is a Toronto-based financial consulting firm, specializing in developing computer based statistical trading strategies.
• Business Analyst at USAA, San Antonio, TX - Feb 12, 2010.
  prepare business-related analyses and research in one or more areas: planning and forecasting, workload/capacity planning, product performance, campaign performance, process performance, financial impact analysis, and member behavior analysis.

Academic/Research positions

• Data Mining Scientist at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), Laurel, Maryland - Feb 22, 2010.
  develop state-of-the-art algorithms with prototype implementation to respond to critical national security tasks with application to very large data sets.
• Postdoctoral Associate in bioinformatics at U. of Florida, Gainesville, FL - Feb 23, 2010.
  The major research focus is on developing and applying DNA sequence analysis and machine learning methodologies to address the computational challenges of analyzing massive sequence data
• Research Position at Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria - Feb 23, 2010.
  a highly motivated PhD candidate (duration: 3 years, extensions as PostDoc after successful evaluation possible) in the field of Visual Analytics, Information Visualization, visual Data Mining and Interaction Design
• Research Fellow at U, of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK - Feb 21, 2010.
  Applications are invited for the above EPSRC funded post to work on the project "Principled Application of Learning Classifier Systems to Large-Scale Challenging Datasets (LCSxLCD)".
• 2 PhD Research Fellowships in Healthcare Information Analysis, Text Mining at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway - Feb 21, 2010.
  The fellows will work in projects with the objective to study, develop and evaluate methods for interpreting, analysing, aggregating and presenting electronic health records.

Meetings (see also All Meetings)

• SBP10, Mar 30-31, Bethesda: Attend free - Feb 23, 2010.
  join us for SBP10 - 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, March 30-31, Bethesda, MD. Attendance at the conference, pre-conference tutorials and post-conference workshop is free.
• Predictive Analytics World Recap - Feb 22, 2010.
  PAW was a bigger conference than October's or last February's and it definitely felt bigger. It seemed to me that there was a larger international presence as well.
• IDA-2010: Call for Participation, Late-Breaking Research - Feb 22, 2010.
  call for poster presentation of late-breaking research and call for participation;
• NASA CIDU-2010: Intelligent Data Understanding, Oct 5-7, Bay area - free registration - Feb 12, 2010.
  a unique chance for researchers, practitioners, and students alike to present their work, or to simply catch up with recent data mining research in the fields of science and engineering.

Publications

• Study Makes It Official: People Are So Predictable - Feb 23, 2010.
  Physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi can guess where you will be tomorrow at 3 p.m. And where you'll be Saturday night at 8. In fact, given enough data, he can predict your location at any time, with an average 93 percent accuracy
• New book on graph management and mining - Feb 22, 2010.
  this comprehensive survey book in graph data analytics covers important topics such as graph languages, indexing, clustering, data generation, pattern mining, classification, keyword search, pattern matching, and privacy.
• SIGEVOlution Volume 4, Issue 3 - Feb 21, 2010.
  The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download from http://www.sigevolution.org
• Better Decisions Through Analytics | Harvard IdeaCast - Feb 13, 2010.
  Tom Davenport, author of "Analytics at Work" explains how companies like Google and 1-800 Flowers are so successful because of their systematic use of data and facts before making any important decision.
• Twitter analyzes Superbowl - Feb 12, 2010.
  My name is @kevinweil and I'm on the analytics team at Twitter. The convergence of sports, brands, and culture around the Super Bowl makes for a particularly fascinating set of tweets to follow.
• Weka Tutorials (Video) - Feb 12, 2010.
  videos show how to use various features of the open source Weka data mining package including Classification, Prediction, and Clustering

News Briefs

• KXEN Appoints John Ball CEO - Feb 23, 2010.
  Prior to joining KXEN, Ball served in several executive roles at salesforce.com, the leading provider of SaaS applications. Most recently, John served as VP & General Manager, Analytics and Reporting Products
• SAS and Accenture Plan to Jointly Develop Analytic Solutions - Feb 21, 2010.
  Accenture and SAS plan to expand their strategic relationship by jointly developing, implementing and managing next-generation predictive analytics solutions, a first for both companies.
• Swivel Adds Sharing, Becomes Google Docs For Enterprise Data - Feb 21, 2010.
  With the new groups feature, data can be shared among small groups of people, like office documents in Google docs. And Swivel is also adding the ability for users to automatically upload data feeds
• Pursway gets 6M investment for Social Analysis Product - Feb 11, 2010.
  Vodafone, Orange, Other Mobile Leaders and Consumer Companies Step Up Influencer Marketing Approach with Pursway's Social Network Analysis

CFP - Calls for Papers (see also All CFP)

• PAKDD-2010 Tutorials, due Feb 28
• PAKDD 2010 Workshop on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery for e-Governance , due Feb 28
• Data Mining for Personalized Educational Systems, due Mar 1
• DMIN'10: Int. Conf. on Data Mining (Las Vegas), due Mar 1
• NNGC Forecasting Competition on time series, due Mar 1
• Automated Knowledge Base Construction, due Mar 5
• PAKDD 2010 Workshop on Emerging Research Trends in Vehicle Health Management , due Mar 12
• CIG-2010: Computational Intelligence and Game, due Mar 15
• PAKDD 2010 Workshop on Knowledge Discovery for Rural Systems , due Mar 19
• PAKDD 2010 Workshop on Feature Selection in Data Mining, due Mar 19
• ICDM Berlin workshops on Data Mining, due Apr 26
• KR4HC-2010: Knowledge Representation for Health Care, due May 7
• NASA CIDU-2010: Intelligent Data Understanding, due May 7
• KDIR: Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval, due May 20
• IC3K: Knowledge Discovery, Engineering and Management, due May 20
• Business Process Intelligence workshop, due May 21
• IEEE ICDM'10, due Jul 13

Quote

David Harrison, Jackson Laboratory gerontologist, on the tendency to accumulate and analyze vast datasets rather than searching for underlying laws. (Thanks to Tom Fawcett)