KDnuggets™ News 11:n29, Dec 1

Features (5) | Webcasts (2) | Jobs (5) | Academic (2) | Competitions (3) | Publications (1) | NewsBriefs (6) | CFP (3) | Quote

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Where did you use Analytics / Data Mining in 2011?

Features

• Top news for Nov 20-26 - Nov 27, 2011.
  Analytics and Data Mining Industry Overview; Google BigQuery Big data analytics; New Poll: Where did you use Analytics / Data Mining in 2011?
  Top jobs: SW Engineer - Data Mining at Siemens Research, NJ; Marketing Insights Manager at Microsoft, Seattle, Chicago, or New York;
• The Search For Analysts To Make Sense Of 'Big Data' - Nov 30, 2011.
  DJ Patil is on a perpetual manhunt, looking for a rare breed: someone with a brain for math, finesse with computers, the eyes of an artist and more.
• Following Digital Breadcrumbs To 'Big Data' Gold - Nov 29, 2011.
  Data analytics itself is not new, but in the past 2-3 years, computing, storage and bandwidth capacity have become so cheap that it has altered the scale of what's possible. This story looks at how Big data is used for fraud detection, job search, best airfare prediction and more.
• Predictive Analytics World March 4-10, 2012, San Francisco - Nov 30, 2011.
  The complete agenda for Predictive Analytics World March 4-10, 2012 in San Francisco has been launched. Big Super Early Bird Savings until Dec 16
• Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees (on Facebook) - Nov 22, 2011.
  Facebook and italian researchers reported that the average num. of friends separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.

Webcasts

• Data Mining: Failure to Launch [Free Webinar, Dec 15, Jan 10] - Nov 30, 2011.
  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.
• Dec 7 online: Exploring Predictive Analytics and Sports - Nov 28, 2011.
  Northwestern U. will host a free online event exploring the growing impact of predictive analytics on sports. Thomas Miller will discuss the emergence of data analytics in sports areas such as player performance, team building, market segmentation, game scheduling and attendance forecasting.

Jobs

• Director of Research Engineering at Fwix, San Francisco, CA - Nov 30, 2011.
  we are developing a system to find, organize and analyze online content about physical places by geotagging the web.
• Master Data Storyteller at Knewton, New York, NY - Nov 29, 2011.
  Knewton is poised to revolutionize the practice of education with the world's most powerful adaptive learning engine. Looking for a master data storyteller to explore and visualize vast and growing quantities of educational data.
• Data Scientists at Knewton, New York, NY - Nov 29, 2011.
  Knewton is poised to revolutionize the practice of education with the world's most powerful adaptive learning engine.
• Software Engineer - Data Mining at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ - Nov 23, 2011.
  lead developing enterprise applications that handle large amounts of data and use distributed infrastructures for data integration and mining.
• Marketing Insights Manager at Microsoft, Seattle, Chicago, or New York - Nov 22, 2011.
  Do you want to create insights on MSN, Bing, Xbox, Windows Live, Windows Phone, and Skype? Do you love to immerse yourself in data and extract the insights that help advertisers reach their goals?

Academic/Research positions

• Assistant Professor, Statistics at S. Dakota State U., Brookings, SD - Nov 29, 2011.
  Looking for researchers in data mining, decision theory, predictive analytics, or machine learning.
• Researcher in Data Mining and Text Mining at U. of Nova Gorica, Nova Gorica, Slovenia - Nov 28, 2011.
  The University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) is seeking an experienced researcher in the filed of data mining (text mining).

Competitions

• Competition: Forecasting S&P 500 - Nov 28, 2011.
  This competition is first of first of many aimed at building a quality market prediction engine.
• Badges, Trophies, and Achievements: Recognition and Accreditation for Informal and Interest-Driven Learning - Nov 27, 2011.
  We seek empirical and theoretical research focusing on areas such as Ranking, badging, and achievement systems in games, clubs, competitions; Accreditation and certificates outside of formal degree programs, including areas such as work skills training, language, and writing. 100K+ in Research, Doctoral, and Student grants.
• WhatDoYouKnow: Educational Data Mining Competition - Nov 23, 2011.
  Given a sequence of item responses from a student, the task is to predict the accuracy of the student's response to a specified next question

Publications

• IBM Social Media Analysis Points to Lower Women's Heels - Nov 25, 2011.
  Usually women's heels stay high during a downturn; perhaps not this time. Analysis of social media in 2008-11 showed that discussions of increasing heel height peaked towards the end of 2009, and declined after that.

News Briefs

• Why eBay is buying recommendation engine Hunch - Nov 29, 2011.
  will use Hunch taste graph technology to provide its users with non-obvious recommendations for items based on their unique tastes.
• GE to Open New Software HQ, Eyes Big Data Developments - Nov 28, 2011.
  $1 billion data management software effort that includes a new global software headquarters and centralized developments on big data, customer experience and predictive analytics.
• EMC Sitting In Sweet Spot Of $70 Billion Big Data Industry - Nov 26, 2011.
  Big Data is a $70 billion industry and growing at a rapid rate of 15% to 20% a year.
• Seminole Hard Rock campaign productivity soars with SAS® Analytics - Nov 25, 2011.
  SAS predictive analytics identify behavior-based patterns, improve marketing; Analysis using SAS EM revealed machine clusters based on customer play behavior.
• Stylitics: Mining Data from Fashion - Nov 25, 2011.
  a start-up that combines fashion with analytics, hopes that you will trust a computer to design your wardrobe
• US Federal agencies use data poorly - Nov 25, 2011.
  Government information managers find importance in analytics for efficiencies, but data quality challenges persist, according to Deloitte report

CFP - Calls for Papers

• EDM-12hybrid: Special Session on Educational Data Mining, due Dec 19
• AppWeb2012: Appification of the Web, due Feb 5
• KDD-2012: 18th ACM SIGKDD Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, due Feb 10

Quote

Best statistics question ever? (txs to flowingdata and Raymond Johnson).

If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct?
A: 25%  B: 50%  C:60%  D: 25%