KDnuggets™ News 11:n02, Jan 19

Features

Top words in KDnuggets for 2010 - Jan 17, 2011.
Top 10 words are data, analytics, mining, business, predictive, social, analysis, research, most, sas. We also analyze 2-word terms and generate word clouds
New Poll: Your Analytics/DM Role and Experience - Jan 16, 2011.
new KDnuggets Poll is asking: what is your analytics/data mining role and experience? Please vote on www.kdnuggets.com
Poll Results: Analytics/DM Conferences attended in 2010 - Jan 15, 2011.
Researchers and practitioners split; KDD and ICDM remain the top research conferences, but SAS M2010 and PAW conferences grow in popularity.
Trouble with Google - losing to spam? - Jan 15, 2011.
a flurry of recent articles complained about decline of Google search quality. Is Google a monoculture or a Sex-starved Gorilla?
Predictive Analytics World: over 40 sessions with case studies - Jan 18, 2011.
Predictive Analytics World, March 14-15 in San Francisco will feature over 40 sessions with case studies from leading enterprises
Most viewed items for Jan 9-15 - Jan 16, 2011.
You Might Already Know This; KDD-2011 - top analytics/data mining meeting in San Diego;
Top jobs: Research Scientists at RSA Labs, Cambridge MA; Principal Software Engineer at Yandex Labs, Palo Alto, CA;
Most viewed items for Jan 2-8 - Jan 9, 2011.
Top Conferences in Data Mining; AI Defeats the Hivemind;
Top jobs: Predictive Modeling Analyst at RTI, Research Triangle Park, NC; IBM Goldstine Memorial Fellowship in Math Sciences, Yorktown Heights, NY;

Software and Competitions (see also All Software)

Large Scale Hierarchical Text classification - Jan 18, 2011.
This year's challenge will increase the scale and the difficulty of the task, using data from Wikipedia, in addition to the ODP Web directory data (www.dmoz.org).
ISMIS 2011 Contest: Music Information Retrieval - Jan 16, 2011.
Recognition of genre of music and instruments playing are the two topics of ISMIS-2011 contest. Successful solution of these problems may lead to development of better applications for indexing and searching through multimedia data.
Unsupervised and Transfer Learning Challenge - Jan 6, 2011.
LEARN from unlabeled data Representations of Similarity Measures and then apply this to supervised learning tasks. You have 50 days to work on 5 unsupervised learning task from large real world databases.
11 Best Web Analytics Tools - Jan 14, 2011.
Every company needs multiple tools to understand the performance of its website, happiness of its customers and gain key context from competitors. Here are 11 tools to help you gather that important data.
Google to Start Charging for Prediction API - Jan 12, 2011.
The service will be free to users for six months or until the they reache a cap of 20,000 predictions. Free accounts will also be limited to 100 queries and 5MB trained per day.
Mapping America: View US Census 2010 Data - Jan 5, 2011.
An excellent interface for viewing US census data
How Twitter Uses NoSQL - Jan 5, 2011.
How Twitter manages Big Data (12 TB/day) with Scribe, Hadoop, Pig, Cloudera, and other software

Jobs (see also All Jobs)

Data Analytics Architect at ETHOCA INC., Toronto, Canada - Jan 18, 2011.
a seasoned data analytics and fraud detection visionary who can both drive our research and development and support the business team with data insights and solutions.
Knowledge management & collaboration, information storage & retrieval, data mining, visualization at Cross Commerce Media (CCM), New York, NY - Jan 18, 2011.
Our proprietary, patent-pending analytics platform unifies a company’s multiple data sources in real time, delivering a collective view of both offline and online metrics.
Statistician/Predictive Modeler at Datalab USA, Germantown, MD - Jan 14, 2011.
Build predictive models and manage their full life cycle from idea to production. Optimize direct marketing strategies using new and existing predictive models.
Senior Applied Research Manager, Yield Optimization, Ads by Amazon at Amazon, Seattle, WA - Jan 13, 2011.
online advertising expert to lead our Performance and Optimization team that will contribute research, analytics and engineering expertise for the development of a successful online advertising program
Sr. Technical Program manager- Information Retrieval, NLP and Machine Learning at Amazon, Seattle, WA - Jan 13, 2011.
Think you can lead and influence multiple innovative software engineering teams as they work on solving large scale product discovery problems related to the Amazon.com catalog?
Research Engineer (Recommendations) at Chomp, San Francisco, CA - Jan 13, 2011.
own design and development of the recommendation engine at Chomp, and any other personalization of user facing "home screen" feeds of recommended apps and users to follow that include machine learning.
Research Engineer (Search) at Chomp, San Francisco, CA - Jan 13, 2011.
research and development of the Chomp search engine; work with the search engineers to productionize your work; stay aware of state of the art research
Principal Software Engineer at Yandex Labs, Palo Alto, CA - Jan 10, 2011.
Responsible for design, implementation, and deployment of medium to large scale systems using C++, python, and shell scripting.
Sr. Software Engineer, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Search at Amazon, Seattle, WA - Jan 8, 2011.
exceptional software engineers to develop algorithms and build systems to automatically solve a variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the Amazon Product Catalog
Research Scientists at RSA Labs, Cambridge MA - Jan 7, 2011.
full staff positions with a focus on machine learning / data mining for security applications. Both well established scientists with strong research records and graduating PhDs of exceptional caliber are encouraged to apply.
Member of Research Staff, Decision Analytics and Optimization at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA - Jan 5, 2011.
perform original research on topics related to decision analytics and optimization of large industrial systems and processes, both deterministic and stochastic.

Academic/Research positions

Three tenure track or tenured positions in Information and Computer Science at Aalto University School of Science, Helsinki, Finland - Jan 13, 2011.
The research aims at the development of fundamental computer science methods for the analysis of large and high-dimensional data sets, and for the modelling and design of complex software, networking and other computational systems.

Meetings (see also All Meetings)

Feb 28, Mountain View: 10 Tips on Building Successful Predictive Analytics Solutions - Jan 7, 2011.
Richard Boire will speak about the process and approach and will highlight some of the key considerations for building successful predictive analytics solutions.
KDD-2011 Call for Papers - Jan 18, 2011.
Abstracts due Feb 11 for KDD-2011, 17th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Aug 21-24, 2011, in San Diego, CA http://www.kdd.org/kdd2011/
KDD-2011 - top analytics/data mining meeting in San Diego - Jan 11, 2011.
International Analytics Conference KDD-2011 is expected to attract 900 scientists and researchers to San Diego's analytics hub.
CFP: DEFT: French Text Mining Challenge - Jan 11, 2011.
The DEFT challenge is a French text mining evaluation workshop. The 2011 edition will focus on diachronic variation within French press corpora, and matches between a scientific article with his abstract
Predictive Analytics World March 2011 in San Francisco - Jan 11, 2011.
New workshops expand Predictive Analytics World San Francisco to 7 Days. These workshops deliver top notch analytical and business expertise across the hottest topics. Register now - Early Bird registration ends on January 31.

Audio/Video

SAS CEO Jim Goodnight on Building Strong Companies and Analytics - Jan 8, 2011.
Goodnight talks about motivating employees, about his philantropic work on education, and about SAS work on fraud detection, health care, and social media analytics.

Publications

New Book: Real Time Data Mining - Jan 18, 2011.
Shows how to move from conventional data mining to real time data mining is through the use of a method called the Real Time Learning Machine or RTLM.
Will You (Re)Tweet This? - Jan 18, 2011.
New analysis could help predict how stories will be shared.
So You Like Big Data - Jan 11, 2011.
Daniel Tunkelang on learning to love big data
You Might Already Know This - Jan 10, 2011.
This paper inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings - often by a lot.
Predictions and Plans for Business Analytics in 2011 - Jan 10, 2011.
James Kobelius talks about principal business-analytics trends: self service, pervasive, social, scalable, cloud, and real-time
10 IT Companies To Watch In 2011 - Jan 6, 2011.
Here are 10 relatively small IT/Analytics companies worth watching in 2011 - primarily because we're impressed with the technology they offer.
Missing Inaction ... Can Be Hazardous to Your Data Mining Project - Jan 6, 2011.
Missing data is one common component that contributes to the unpleasant moniker "dirty data". We'll start first with detecting it.
Journal's Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage - Jan 6, 2011.
a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events, will be published in a respected psychology journal, generating a mixture of amusement and scorn.

News Briefs

Germany Threatens to Fine Companies That Use Google Analytics - Jan 17, 2011.
Concluding that Google hasn't adequately complied with their demands, German data protection officials are warning that web companies in the country could face a "steep fine" if they use Google Analytics.
IBM Watson Analytics Techhology for Healthcate - Jan 17, 2011.
Can IBM Watson help physicians find evidence and scientific support for diagnosis and treatment decisions, or act as a physician's assistant during patient consults, crunching data from similar cases as the physician takes voice notes?
2010 a Banner Year for Clarabridge with 105% Growth From 2009 - Jan 16, 2011.
New Products, APIs and Enhancements Drive Completely Organic Sales Growth, 95% Retention Rate of Existing Customers and a Doubling of Enterprise Customer Acquisition Over 2009.
Aster Data Leads Next-Generation Analytic Platform Market - Jan 15, 2011.
New report from the Information Difference places Aster Data in the lead technology spot among new generation of analytic platform solutions.
Klout Gets $8.5M to Create the Page Rank of the Social Web - Jan 14, 2011.
Klout is a service for measuring social influence online
Belgacom Standardizes on KXEN for Next-Generation Predictive Analytics - Jan 13, 2011.
Belgacom, a leading fixed and mobile telecom provider in Europe, standardized on KXEN to drive stronger customer relationships and increase revenue in its business and consumer markets.
Gartner: BI to be consumed on mobiles in 2 years - Jan 13, 2011.
Business intelligence and analytics leaders need to embrace four trends, including the growing popularity of business applications on mobile devices, according to analysts at Gartner.
Supreme Court Reviews Data Mining & Free Speech - Jan 13, 2011.
The US Supreme Court has agreed to review whether laws that ban data mining - specifically, the sale of prescription drug info that identifies prescribers and patients for commercial marketing purposes - are unconstitutional
Startup Turns Artificial Intelligence into Serendipity Engine for Mobile - Jan 10, 2011.
Clever Sense is a start-up providing an AI-based, context-aware platform for location-based services.
Revolution Analytics Releases Annual Results - Jan 7, 2011.
Highlight of company results for 2010 is a 450% increase in revenue from its flagship product, Revolution R Enterprise.
Northwestern University Launches Online Master of Science in Predictive Analytics Program - Jan 7, 2011.
The MSPA program offers students a thorough grounding in data mining concepts and applications. It also focuses on developing the strategic, project-management and communication skills
5 Predictions for Online Data in 2011 - Jan 6, 2011.
In 2011, data science job openings will see a rise in numbers similar to the gaggle of community management and social media marketing gigs that materialized out of the ether nearly three years ago
Data Mining Gains Traction in Education - Jan 5, 2011.
educational data mining is using the data collected through normal school activities to explore learning in more detail than ever before, and researchers say the day when educators can make use of Amazon-like feedback on student learning behaviors may be closer than most people think.

CFP - Calls for Papers (see also All CFP)

DEFT challenge, a French text mining evaluation workshop, due Jan 25
Prudsys DATA MINING CUP 2011, due Feb 1
KDD-2011: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Workshop proposals, due Feb 1
Int. Conf. on Machine Learning, due Feb 1
World Congress: ICDM 2011, MLDM 2011 and MDA 2011, due Feb 1
KDD-2011: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, due Feb 11
Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, due Feb 18
Advances in Information Mining and Management, due Mar 1
ICDM 2011 workshops, due Apr 1
ECML PKDD 2011, due Apr 5

Quote

"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." (H.P. Lovecraft)
thanks to Sandro Saitta