KDnuggets™ News 11:n13, May 25, 2011

Features

New Poll: Your Education Level - May 24, 2011.
What is your highest education level? Please vote.
Poll Results: analytics/data mining tools used for a real project - May 23, 2011.
The poll had a record participation (over 1,100 voters). 43% of them used only commercial software, 32% only free software, and 25% both. RapidMiner, R, and Excel were again the most popular tools, with SAS remaining the top commercial tool.
Predictive Analytics World New York City 2011 Agenda - May 24, 2011.
Super Early Bird reg. until Jun 15! Discover new content covering all the latest topics and advanced methods by participating in PAW's workshops, case studies, and educational sessions.
KDD Innovation and Service Awards: Nominations due July 1st, 2011 - May 18, 2011.
KDD Innovation and Service Awards recognize outstanding technical and service contributions to the KDD field. Nominations are due July 1.
Most viewed items for May 15-21 - May 22, 2011.
New Poll: Analytics, Data Mining Tools Used; New Startup in Predictive Analytics Market;
Top jobs: Data Analyst at DataQuick, San Diego; PhD, Postdoc position in Machine Learning at U. of Hildesheim.
Most viewed items for May 8-14 - May 15, 2011.
New Poll: Analytics, Data Mining Tools Used; Heritage Health Prize Demands Exclusivity; Others Call for a Boycott
Top jobs: Project manager, data mining / product development at Vadis Consulting, Belgium; Sr. MTS Architect at PayPal.

Courses, Webcasts, Meetings (see also All Courses)

Learn What Really Works in Data Mining, June 13 - 17, New York City - May 10, 2011.
Leverage highly valuable insight from within your existing data through an intensive course series with over 20 years of innovation.
Jun 22 Webinar: Data Mining: Failure to Launch - May 24, 2011.
Attend this free webinar to learn how to get started with data mining and overcome both strategic and tactical limitations that cause data mining projects to fall short of their potential.
Analytics Innovation Summits: Chicago (May 26-27), London (Jun 2-3) - May 22, 2011.
By bringing together the leaders and innovators from the Industry, these events provide the premier platform in USA and Europe for thought-sharing and innovation for executives working in the analytics and business intelligence space.

Software (see also All Software)

Last chance to participate: 5th Annual Data Miner Survey - May 23, 2011.
Rexer Analytics is conducting our 5th annual survey of the analytic behaviors, views and preferences of data mining professionals. Last chance to participate!
First Look - Yottamine - May 19, 2011.
Yottamine Predictive Platform is going to be attractive to modelers who know how to create the right analytic data set to feed into a model and who want to use scalable cloud resources to build their final model.
Wikipedia User Contribution Dataset - May 13, 2011.
prepared for an ongoing study on user reputation and content quality in Wikipedia at U. California, Irvine.

Jobs (see also All Jobs)

Scientist - Predictive Analytics at ISO Innovative Analytics, San Francisco, CA (preferred); Lisle, IL, Jersey City, NJ (possible) - May 23, 2011.
manage all aspects of predictive-modeling projects and be the senior technical resource; apply advanced analytic techniques and data management skills to assessing risk in the property and casualty insurance industry.
Senior Analytics Consultant at Pitney Bowes Business Insight, Boston, MA - May 19, 2011.
work with clients on pre-sales and post-sales engagements to support customer-focused analysis, such as; response analysis, churn prediction, credit-risk and cross-sell potential in industries such as banking, insurance, telco and retail.
Data Analyst at DataQuick, San Diego, CA - May 17, 2011.
plays a critical role in the successful deployment of analytic projects for DataQuick clients; Evaluating, managing, manipulating, and ensuring the quality of the various data inputs and outputs that will be involved in each client initiative.
Senior Data Mining and Statistical Analysis Role at JPMorgan Chase, Columbus - May 13, 2011.
focus on assisting customers in improving their business performance and client profitability through engagement based projects consisting of complex data mining and analysis, statistical and predictive modeling, and forecasting.
Analytics Manager at Opera Solutions, Paris, France - May 13, 2011.
design, develop, and deploy state-of-the-art, data-driven predictive models to solve business problems using the latest and most appropriate technologies in machine learning, statistical modeling and Operations Research.
Senior Data Mining Engineer at eBay, San Jose, CA - May 12, 2011.
TnS applications proactively prevent fraud, catch fraud, enforce eBay policies, as well as collect and mine data that will help build future Trust and Safety strategies.
Project manager, data mining / product development at Vadis Consulting S.A., Brussels, Belgium - May 10, 2011.
Manage complex data mining and data quality projects. Translate the market needs into solution specification.
Experienced data miner / manager at Vadis Consulting S.A., Brussels, Belgium - May 10, 2011.
Translating business problem and potential actions into a decision process based on data analyses; Build predictive models and segmentation analyses; Lead the implementation of a solution productize processes using model predictions
R&D and Software Engineer at Vadis Consulting S.A., Brussels, Belgium - May 10, 2011.
Develop data and graph mining components in C++, and research activities in advanced algorithms and data/information technologies. VADIS is a consulting, BI solution and application software company.

Academic/Research positions

PhD and Postdoc position in Machine Learning at U. of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany - May 18, 2011.
Both positions are available immediately and for three years. The Information Systems and Machine Learning Lab is a research group focusing on machine learning, especially predictive modelling and probabilistic methods.
Postdoc for approximate graph mining at U. of Grenoble, LIG lab, Grenoble, France - May 12, 2011.
design approximate graph mining methods, which could scale to huge quantity of input data while providing subgraphs of sufficient quality.

Competitions (see also All Competitions)

The Privacy Challenge in Online Prize Contests - May 23, 2011.
How Overstock Reclab Prize and Heritage Health Prize avoid Netflix-style privacy blowup in their new contests
Detection of Differences between Non-Standard Distributions - May 23, 2011.
looking for statistical approaches to describe changes (or shifts) in the distributions of data on experimental subjects between two different treatments. Should be easy to explain to non-technical people.
A $1M prize for the best product recommendation algorithm - May 20, 2011.
RecLab $1M Prize on Overstock.com challenges researchers to advance the state of the art in product recommendations with new privacy-secure cloud environment
Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers - May 17, 2011.
use data about teacher requests and donations to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Help to shape your school system's budget by revealing what teachers really need.
inSCIght Scientific Podcast: Kaggle, Competitions for Data Scientists - May 12, 2011.
The latest episode, "Hacking Education: crowd sourcing for the win!", with Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom, discusses competitions for developers and data scientists.
TunedIT Contest: identify substances from electromagnetic signatures. - May 12, 2011.
Canadian hi-tech company offers $45,000 for the best algorithm to identify substances from electromagnetic signatures. Contest hosted by TunedIT.

Publications

Podcast: The Personal Data Revolution - May 14, 2011.
the average person can now collect and analyze unprecedented amounts of data about themselves. What was once the province of extreme athletes and dieters has been democratized and the resulting movement is called 'The Quantified Self.'
Podcast: Data Journalism - May 14, 2011.
The immense amounts of data collected by local, state and federal government agencies can be an incredibly valuable trove for enterprising journalists. It can also be a pointless slog.
Podcast: Two Cautionary Data Tales - May 14, 2011.
Data doesn't always expose and explain; it can also lead us astray. OTM producer Jamie York looks at two times in the recent past when an overreliance on data has had disastrous consequences.
Podcast: The 'Decline Effect' and Scientific Truth - May 14, 2011.
Surprising and exciting scientific findings capture our attention and captivate the press. But what if, at some point after a finding has been soundly established, it starts to disappear?
Brand new KNIME Press announces first eBook - May 21, 2011.
helps new KNIME user to learn through concise, hands-on examples and exercises how to produce practical results quickly.
ReactiveSearch presents: A day in the (hard) life of Thomas - May 21, 2011.
Here is a funny video - a day in the life of data analyst - from makers of Grapheur Data Mining and Interactive Visualization tool.
Data Mining Research Blog celebrating five years ! - May 20, 2011.
Here are five interesting milestones along the way.
Why you can't really anonymize your data - May 19, 2011.
The anonymization process is an illusion. There are now so many different public datasets to cross-reference, any set of records with a non-trivial amount of information on someone's actions has a good chance of matching identifiable public records.
On CART and Cross-Validation, Data Mining - May 18, 2011.
Historic video: Richard Carson interviews CART founding fathers Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman, Richard Olshen and Charles Stone on CART and Cross-Validation
2011 Data Scientist Summit Summary - May 14, 2011.
reflections on 2011 Data Scientist Summit from Ryan Rosario and David Smith
McKinsey: New Ways to Exploit Raw Data May Bring Surge of Innovation - May 13, 2011.
estimates the potential benefits from deploying data-harvesting technologies and skills, such as $300B value to health-care system, and increasing profit margins by 60% for American retailers.
Data Mining Poll Data Over the Years - May 12, 2011.
Anne Milley investigates the KDnuggets Data Mining Tools Polls over the past 10 years. See what she finds and what happens to the ratio of commercial, open-source and own code.
Grab Bag: Frequently-Asked Data Mining Questions and Answers - May 11, 2011.
Some of the best interactions from Tim Graettinger Q&A sessions at the end of his data mining "nuts and bolts" webinar.

News Briefs

IBM launches Hadoop-based analytics software, big data services - May 23, 2011.
IBM will invest $100 million on research for analytics and big data projects and expanded its portfolio accordingly. The company also launched Hadoop-based services.
Clarabridge 4.5 Providing Sentiment and Text Analytics - May 20, 2011.
adds integration with Lithium, NM Incite Buzzmetrics and Radian6, Real-time APIs, Improved Analytics, and French and Portuguese NLP in Support of new EMEA Headquarters
Kleiner Perkins Leads $9M Round In Apache Hadoop-Based Analytics Platform Datameer - May 19, 2011.
Datameer, a startup that offers a big data analytics solution built on Apache Hadoop, has raised $9.25 million led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Redpoint Ventures
New Startup in Predictive Analytics Market - May 17, 2011.
Big data predictive analytics provider Alpine Data Labs secures large capital boost; enters U.S. market
ODNI: We did no data mining in 2010 - May 16, 2011.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence performed no data mining in 2010, but at least two programs in development could be used for data mining in the future
EMC's Hadoop Move Points To Analysis Arms Race - May 15, 2011.
Planned Greenplum appliance will bridge structured and unstructured data, and it's easy to see the industry's top vendors will follow with their own all-purpose analytic platforms.
IIA Study: Analytics Critical To The Future Of Health Care, Life Sciences - May 13, 2011.
Analytics-based tools can change health care. The use of analytics - data, statistical methods and analyses, and rigorous, quantitative approaches to decision making about patients and their care - is at the heart of evidence-based medicine.

CFP - Calls for Papers (see also All CFP)

SNAKDD 2011: Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis, due May 25
PAW-GOV: New Conference: Predictive Analytics World for GOVERNMENT (speaker proposals), due May 30
OSINT-WM 2011: Open Source Intelligence and Web Mining 2011, due May 31
IEEE GrC2011: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing, due Jun 1
MUSE 2011: 2nd Int. ECML/PKDD 2011 Workshop on Mining Ubiquitous And Social Environments, due Jun 3
ICDM '11: IEEE ICDM 2011, due Jun 17
LSHC2: Joint ECML/PKDD - PASCAL Workshop on Large-Scale Hierarchical Classification, due Jun 20
MIND 2011: ECML/PKDD 2011 Workshop: Mining Complex Entities from Network and Biomedical Data, due Jun 20
SMUC 2011: Search and Mining User-generated Contents, due Jun 24
WSDM-12 workshop proposals: Workshop proposals for Web Search and Data Mining Conference, due Jul 1
IWGS 2011: ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on GeoStreaming , due Jul 22
PADM 2011: ICDM Workshop on Privacy Aspects of Data Mining, due Jul 23
BioDM 2011: ICDM 2011 Workshop on Biological Data Mining and its Applications in Healthcare, due Jul 23
DMCS 2011: Data Mining Case Studies and Practice Prize, due Jul 23
DaMNet 2011: ICDM 2011 Workshop on Data Mining in Networks, due Jul 23
RSWeb 2011: Recommender Systems and the Social Web, due Jul 25

Quote

Jonathan Schooler: Maybe we could just get rid of the decline effect by studying it. [LAUGHTER]. A thought-provoking study which questions the validity of many recent findings in "soft" sciences. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2011/05/13/04