KDnuggets™ News 12:n01, Jan 11

Features

Poll Results: Hottest Analytics / Data Mining Topics in 2012 - Jan 11, 2012.
The biggest surprise is the lack of surprises here. The top 3 topics were Big Data, Analytics in the Cloud/Hadoop, and Social Analytics. Privacy was in the last place.
Predictive Analytics World March 4-10 2012 in San Francisco - Jan 10, 2012.
PAW focuses on concrete examples of deployed predictive analytics - learn precisely how top practitioners deploy predictive modeling and what kind of business impact they get. Early Bird pricing ends soon.
Report: Competitive advantage via text analytics - Jan 9, 2012.
Text analytics report spotlights analytics as a source of competitive advantage in finance, pharmaceuticals, telecoms and others
5 Big Data Startups to Watch in 2012 - Jan 2, 2012.
Why Cloudera, MapR, 10gen, and two others are worth watching in 2012
Top news, jobs in December - Jan 3, 2012.
Top Analytics / Data Mining Stories in 2011; Growing your own data scientists; 5 Big Data predictions
Top jobs: Decision Scientist at Microsoft; PRINCIPAL (Federal Finance/Analytics) at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Additions to KDnuggets in December - Jan 1, 2012.
New datasets (OpenData), education (certificates), meetings, software (Text, Web Mining), solutions (Music discovery, Security, Sports)
Top news for Dec 25-31 - Jan 1, 2012.
New Poll: Hottest analytics / data mining areas in 2012?; Breakthrough non-parametric exploration using MIC; Stat/ML Data Mining with GenIQ
Top jobs: Senior Analyst at US Treasury, FinCEN; Associate Prof. Knowledge Mining, TU Darmstadt.

Courses, Events

TMA Courses in Predictive Analytics [Feb: Atlanta; Apr: Las Vegas; May: DC] - Jan 1, 2012.
TMA Courses in Predictive Analytics - get up to speed in data mining faster and more effectively than with any other program available

Webcasts

Webcast, Jan 25: The Power of Big Data and the Insights of Predictive Analytics - Jan 10, 2012.
Learn how Zementis and Datameer predictive analytics can help you deliver standards-based analytics on a massive parallel scale.
Webinar, Jan 24: Managing the Next Best Activity with Predictive Analytics - Dec 30, 2011.
Join Decision management guru, James Taylor and KXEN's VP Marco Casalaina as they discuss how to implement Next Best Activity using best-in-class predictive analytics and business rules.

Jobs

Data Mining Analyst at Waterfront International, Toronto, Canada - Jan 11, 2012.
Perform financial market data research and analysis to identify and resolve data issues using advanced data mining techniques; Develop proprietary data mining tools and predictive models.
Machine Learning and Data Mining Positions for Junior/Senior Research Scientists at AT&T Labs (Research), Florham Park, NJ and San Fransisco, CA - Jan 10, 2012.
Successful candidates will be a part of a diverse group of world renowned researchers, and will have an opportunity to apply their research in a variety of domains. The application deadline is Jan 31.
Analytical Modeling Staff Scientist - #11002720 at SAS Institute, San Diego, CA - Jan 10, 2012.
analyze customer data and build high-end analytical models for solving high-value business problems, such as credit card fraud, credit risk, network security, tax fraud detection, and revenue and collections optimization.
Researcher at 1199 SEIU, New York City or Boston - Jan 9, 2012.
1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East is the largest, fastest growing and most progressive union representing over 300,000 hospital, nursing home, homecare and human service workers. The job is to work with the research staff in maintaining and analyzing large databases of health care information.
Data Analytics Engineer at Pearson, London, UK - Jan 3, 2012.
Pearson, a leading international publishing company, looking for a full-stack developer with an understanding of modern data mining techniques: machine learning, information retrieval, collaborative filtering, map-reduce algorithms, and visualization

Academic/Research positions

Summer Interns at Telefonica Research, Madrid, Spain - Jan 10, 2012.
work in the area of data mining and international development, seeking cell phone-based behavioral trends that might provide critical information for emerging regions.
Researcher in Data Mining and Text Mining at U. of Nova Gorica, Nova Gorica, Slovenia - Jan 10, 2012.
The University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) is seeking an experienced researcher in the field of data mining and text mining.
Asst. Professor, Computer Science at Washington State U., Pullman, WA, USA. - Jan 2, 2012.
tenure track faculty position in CS with research emphasis in AI, machine learning, data mining, or intelligent environments.
Associate Professor (W2) Knowledge Mining at DIPF and TU Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Germany - Dec 30, 2011.
This professorship should strengthen and integrate the existing competencies of the DIPF in the interdisciplinary area of the technology based assessment and of the TU Darmstadt in the area of the knowledge discovery in the Web.
Lead/Research Scientists, Text Analysis at Leibniz Institute (DIPF), Frankfurt, Germany - Dec 30, 2011.
for research in Computer Science, Automatic Text Analysis, and Information Processing

Competitions

JRS 2012 Contest: Classification of Biomedical Papers - Jan 2, 2012.
Design an algorithm for multi-label classification of scientific publications in biomedicine. There are 20,000 samples made available for analysis, each comprising 25,640 attributes.

Publications

Data Mining Lessons from "Moneyball" - Jan 10, 2012.
The "Moneyball" book/movie was a source of numerous and familiar "lessons" about data mining - but couched in the less familiar context of major league baseball.
New Book: Statistical and Machine-Learning Data Mining, by Bruce Ratner - Dec 29, 2011.
It is the only book, to date, that distinguishes between statistical data mining and machine-learning data mining. The book explains GenIQ Model, a machine-learning alternative to statistical regression.
Book: Spectral Feature Selection for Data Mining - Dec 28, 2011.
introduces a novel feature selection technique that establishes a general platform for studying existing feature selection algorithms and developing new algorithms for emerging problems in real-world applications.

News Briefs

Digital Reasoning and TeraDact Partner to Automatically Remove Sensitive Information from Big Data - Jan 9, 2012.
In conjunction with Synthesys, TeraDactor can automatically assist in appropriately classifying information not recognized by the original data provider and allows participants to push and pull information without waiting for the declassification process
IBM's new CEO sees gold in data mining - Jan 9, 2012.
If IBM's new CEO Virginia Rometty had just one word for you about the next big thing, it might sound a bit reminiscent of that famous scene from "The Graduate." Here one word: Analytics.
Mu Sigma raises $108M to grow analytics, big data services - Dec 28, 2011.
Mu Sigma, the largest pure-play provider of analytics and decision support services closed $108 million investment round led by General Atlantic. Mu Sigma is already profitable, but will use the investment to accelerate its growth in the analytics services.

CFP - Calls for Papers

PAISI-12: Intelligence and Security Informatics, due Jan 13
DMHM-12: Data Mining for Healthcare Management , due Jan 13
EDM-12: Educational Data Mining , due Jan 18
KDD-2012: 18th ACM SIGKDD Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, due Feb 10
ADMI-12: Agents and Data Mining Interaction, due Feb 28
DATA-12: Data Technologies and Applications, due Feb 28
DMC-12: DATA MINING CUP 2012, prudsys User Days, due Mar 1
ECML/PKDD-12 WT: Workshops and Tutorials at ECML PKDD 2012, due Mar 9
ASONAM 2012: Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining, due Mar 15

Quote

Some day answers (correct answers!) will be so cheap that the really valuable things will be questions. A really good question will be worth a thousand correct answers.

Kevin Kelly