KDnuggets™ News 10:n05, Mar 10

Features

• New Poll: How useful are sports analytics? - Mar 9, 2010.
  Is it a Sports Analytics Bubble? The recent MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference drew over 1,000 people - clearly Sports analytics are hot.
• Poll Results: Are there concise laws in large data? - Mar 9, 2010.
  35% think concise laws are frequent, but concise laws are probabilistic due to noise randomness inherent in human or biological systems
• Most viewed items for week Feb 28-Mar 6 - Mar 7, 2010.
  most viewed news, jobs, positions
• Most viewed items for week Feb 21-28 - Mar 1, 2010.
  most viewed news, jobs, positions
• Predictive Analytics World: Save-the-Date and Call-for-Speakers - Mar 9, 2010.
  Save-the-date for the next PAW: Oct 19-20, 2010 in Washington DC; Speaker proposals deadline: April 16, 2010
• New York, Apr 13: Inaugural Sentiment Analysis Symposium - Feb 26, 2010.
  This event bridges technology and business: software that discovers business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news and enterprise feedback.
• Ensemble Methods in Data Mining: Improving Accuracy Through Combining Predictions - Feb 25, 2010.
  Ensemble methods have been called the most influential development in Data Mining and Machine Learning in the past decade. They combine multiple models into one usually more accurate than the best of its components

Courses (see also All Courses)

• Stanford University online graduate education - Mar 2, 2010.
  Connect to online graduate education in: Data mining, Financial modeling, Risk management

Webcasts (see also All Webcasts)

• Free Webinar Mar 16 Data Mining: Failure to Launch - Mar 9, 2010.
  Learn How to Get Predictive Modeling Off the Ground and Into Orbit

Software (see also All Software)

• Making Sense of Mountains of Data - Mar 7, 2010.
  Pivot's simple and intuitive graphical interface will help insights about the data to pop out visually from even very large collections of data
• Oracle Data Mining is now available on the Amazon Cloud - Mar 1, 2010.
  Oracle Data Mining Development has set up an instance on the Amazon cloud for prospective customers who want to try Oracle Data Mining 11gR2's in-database data mining

Jobs (see also All Jobs)

• Statistician / Data Analyst at LoopNet, San Francisco, CA - Mar 8, 2010.
  LoopNet, Inc. is the leading information services provider to the commercial real estate industry, and operates the largest and most heavily trafficked commercial real estate listing service online.
• Research scientist at HP Labs China, Beijing, China - Mar 5, 2010.
  HP Labs China is focused in the web and rich content technology to help users to turn data on the web and in organizations into valuable information.
• Software Development Manager, Catalog Search Experience and Browse at Amazon.com, Seattle, WA, USA - Mar 4, 2010.
  Amazon.com's Fact Extraction (FX) team is looking for a technically strong and charismatic leader to manage a team of software developers tasked with improving the quality of our catalog
• Software Development Engineer at Amazon.com, Seattle, WA, USA - Mar 4, 2010.
  The Fact Extraction (FX) team specializes in processing semi-structured merchant contributions to extract meaningful structured information to augment and correct Amazon's Item Catalog.
• Senior Algorithms Engineer/ Senior Statistician at Efficient Frontier, Sunnyvale, CA - Mar 3, 2010.
  Efficient Frontier is a leading provider of cross channel performance optimization platform across search and display advertising
• Scientist/Sr Scientist, Ad Selection at Turn Inc, Redwood City, CA and other locations - Feb 25, 2010.
  Turn Inc. is the smart platform for digital advertising. Our mission is to deliver the most effective data-driven advertising in the world
• Manager, Live Channels at Digitas Health, New York, NY - Feb 24, 2010.
  You skillfully translate marketing strategy into dialogue strategy and contact approach through the development, analysis and measurement of the various live customer interaction channels, including phone, face-to-face, Web and IM

Meetings (see also All Meetings)

• Modern Massive Data Sets Workshop, Jun 15-18, Stanford, CA - Mar 8, 2010.
  the goal is to explore novel techniques for modelling and analyzing massive, high-dimensional, and nonlinearly-structured scientific and internet data sets
• 2010 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining - Mar 5, 2010.
  Pre-Registration Deadline: March 30, 2010; Invited Speakers: Phillip Gibbons, Vipin Kumar, Stephen Muggleton, Grace Wahba
• IHI-2010: 1st ACM Int. Conf. on Health Informatics - Mar 5, 2010.
  IHI 2010 is ACM new conference on Health Informatics, Nov 11-12, Washington, DC - premier community forum concerned with the application of computer and information science principles and information and communication technology to problems in healthcare
• Mar 20: ACM Data Mining / Machine Learning Camp - Feb 26, 2010.
  Association of Computing Machinery presents Data Mining / Machine Learning "Camp", San Jose, CA

Publications

• Survey Results: Difficulty and Importance of Various Modeling Steps - Mar 9, 2010.
  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.
• Sports Analytics Conference: What Geeks Don't Get Panel Report - Mar 9, 2010.
  Simmons noted that the biggest issue he would like see is for those in the vanguard of the statistical revolution to make numbers more relatable to the common fan.
• Recommendation algorithm wants to show you something new - Mar 9, 2010.
  new algorithms that will make more tangential recommendations to users, which can help expand their interests, which will increase the longevity and utility of the recommendation system itself.
• Top 10 data mining mistakes - free paper - Mar 8, 2010.
  What if you knew the top 10 data mining mistakes so you don't make them? Get a free paper here
• The Onion: Google Response To Privacy Concerns - Mar 8, 2010.
  Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.
• Misconceptions About Statistics - Mar 5, 2010.
  Traditional statistical tools ... are overly simplistic and, in many cases inappropriate for the task of modeling human behavior - true?
• Wired: How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web - Mar 4, 2010.
  Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one
• Top Marketing Trends Survey - Mar 3, 2010.
  Marketing Executives Networking Group & Anderson Analytics Release Results of Third Annual Top Marketing Trends Survey
• The data deluge - Mar 2, 2010.
  Businesses, governments and society are only starting to tap its vast potential
• Economist: Data, data everywhere - Mar 1, 2010.
  Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier, but also big headaches
• Q&A: IBM's Top SPSS Exec On Predictive Analytics - Feb 28, 2010.
  Marketing veteran Deepak Advani talks about business analytics, predictive models, and Big Blue's coming decision-management offerings.

News Briefs

• Jingwei International Preliminary Results for FY 2009 - Mar 9, 2010.
  Net revenue for Q4 2009 is expected to increase about 50% from Q3 2009.
• MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Summary - Mar 8, 2010.
  statistical analysis had become mainstream in the NBA.
• Facebook Analytics War Heats Up - Mar 7, 2010.
  a few days after WebTrends spurred excitement over its new Facebook tracking capabilities, competitors Omniture and Coremetrics have unveiled their own
• Intrusion Inc. Debuts Savant, a New Class of Data Mining and Network Analysis Devices - Mar 6, 2010.
  Savant encompasses all the traditional network performance monitoring, security surveillance and forensic analysis while adding truly unique functions
• Clarabridge launches Self Service Text Analytics (Beta) - Mar 5, 2010.
  Online classification, sentiment analysis, and root cause analysis of textual data now available for smaller organizations, market research firms and/or one-time analysis projects
• IBM Energy Efficient Method For Fast Data Quality Analysis - Mar 4, 2010.
  IBM Researchers Develop Energy Efficient Method to Analyze the Quality of Data at Record Speeds - Nine Terabytes of Data Validated in Less than 20 Minutes.
• INFORMS Data Mining Student Paper Award - Mar 3, 2010.
  The award is given to the best paper topic related to data mining by a student author, and presented at INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, TX Nov 7-10, 2010.
• White House Reassures On Data Mining - Mar 2, 2010.
  White House officials said a January memo aimed at encouraging information sharing and issued in response to the Christmas Day attempted bombing, should not be perceived as a revival of the controversial data-sifting program
• Aristotle Files Patent on Political Data Mining Technology - Mar 2, 2010.
  patent filed on "Integration of Voter and Contributor Data Into Political Software and Compliance Systems for Purposes of Solicitation, Compliance, Vetting and Calls to Action"
• Warranty Fraud Detection - Mar 2, 2010.
  SAS says send us your claims data and we'll show you the fraud. If upwards of 10% to 15% of claims are in some way suspect, such a system could pay for itself in just a few months. Does it sound too good to be true?
• IDmachines and Probayes predictive analytics for security - Feb 28, 2010.
  IDmachines and Probayes join forces to bring powerful predictive analytics to the United States' enterprise security and information technology markets
• Open Text to Acquire Nstein Technologies - Feb 26, 2010.
  Nstein will extend the breadth of Open Text's ECM offerings and further Open Text's position as the leading independent ECM vendor in the marketplace
• Truly random numbers - Feb 25, 2010.
  A new approach to generating truly random numbers could lead to improved Internet security and better weather forecasts
• SAS helps SquareTwo Financial recover charged-off assets through better data analysis - Feb 25, 2010.
  SquareTwo Financial, a leader in the $40 billion asset recovery and management industry, selected SAS
• Former IBM Researcher Claudia Perlich joins MediaSixDegrees as Chief Scientist - Feb 24, 2010.
  The hiring enhances the company's already world class research team, which is responsible for developing the data analysis and science that powers the company's proprietary social targeting technology.
• Oracle Data Mining Races with America's Cup - Feb 24, 2010.
  Oracle Data Mining was used by the performance analysis team of the BMW/Oracle Racing team in their preparation to win the America's Cup race off the coast of Spain.

CFP - Calls for Papers (see also All CFP)

• EVENTS 2010: Recognising and tracking Web and life events, due Mar 12
• ASONAM 2010: Advances in Social Network Analysis and Data Mining, due Mar 15
• Data Mining and Forecasting Stream, due Mar 26
• IADIS European Conference On Data Mining 2010, due Mar 29
• Machine Learning and Games Workshop, due Apr 7
• Machine Learning Open Source Software at ICML-10, due Apr 10
• Book Chapter Proposals: XML Data Mining, due Apr 15
• Predictive Analytics World, due Apr 16
• SNAKDD 2010: Social Network Mining and Analysis, due Apr 30
• MLD'10: Learning from Multi-Label Data, due May 2
• StreamKDD: Novel Data Stream Pattern Mining Techniques, due May 4
• MLG-2010: Eighth Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs, due May 7
• 3rd PLANNING TO LEARN ECAI Workshop , due May 7
• DS-10: Discovery Science 2010, due May 12
• IEEE Symposium on Web Society, due May 15
• British AI-2010, due Jun 1
• IHI: 1st ACM Int. Conf. on Health Informatics , due Jun 2
• INFORMS Data Mining Student Paper Award, due Jul 15
• AIJ spec issue: AI, Wikipedia and Semi-Structured Resources, due Oct 31

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Nissim Taleb