KDnuggets™ News 12:n10, May 2

Features

From Data Mining to Big Data and Beyond - Apr 19, 2012.
I look at the changing trends in analyzing data and the popularity of different terms, such as statistics, data mining, knowledge discovery, data science, and Big Data, and examine the gap between marketing and popular perceptions.
Million Song Dataset Challenge - Apr 29, 2012.
You have the full listening history for 1M users, and half history for 100K users, and your goal is to predict the missing half.
Top news, jobs in April - May 1, 2012.
Python in Big Data; Target hears you said yes, before you do; Network Analytics meets Text Mining
Top jobs: Manager, Advanced Analytics at Orbitz; Analytics Lead/Scientist - NLP at Opera Solutions.
Additions to KDnuggets in April - May 1, 2012.
New companies (Kontagent, CogNova, Yottamine), datasets, education (NYU, Caltech, Oxford, Udemy), meetings, software (BigML, kSuite, FMiner), and more.
Predictive Analytics World Chicago - June 25-26, 2012 - KDnuggets discount - May 1, 2012.
Listen to experts from top companies, including Allstate, BBC, eBay, HP, Mazda, Microsoft. Attend over 40 sessions, hands-on workshops. Network with peers and top solution providers, and much more. KDnuggets discount.
Actuary - 2nd best job in the US - Apr 21, 2012.
Actuary is the 2nd most desirable job in the US, ranked by a combination of work environment, income, stress level, physical demands and hiring outlook.
Top news for Apr 22-28 - Apr 29, 2012.
Quantum Random Number Generator; Network Analytics meets Text Mining; Short History of Data Science
Top jobs: Research Associates at Merck; Manager, Analysis and Reporting at SAGE Pubs.
Top news for Apr 15-21 - Apr 22, 2012.
Network Analytics meets Text Mining with KNIME; Target hears you said yes, before you do; From Data Mining to Big Data and Beyond
Top jobs: Director of Algorithms/Analytics at Guardian Analytics; Marketing Analyst at Springleaf Financial

Courses, Events

Analytics: Putting It All to Work - May 1, 2012.
How you can cope with information overload and create real business value from your data. This 1-day course debuts in June and is taught by Bart Baesens, PhD.

Webcasts

Webinar: Data Mining: Failure to Launch [June 7, July 17] - May 1, 2012.
Learn how to get started with predictive modeling and overcome strategic and tactical limitations that cause data mining projects to fall short of their potential.
May 17 Webcast - Analytically Speaking Expert Exchange Panel - Apr 26, 2012.
Join John Sall, co-founder and Executive Vice President of SAS, and a panel of experts to discuss ways to radiate analytic excellence throughout your organization.

Software

Ajay Ohri reviews BigML.com: Machine Learning meets the Cloud - Apr 26, 2012.
The website is very intutively designed, well known data sources are included. Decision trees is currently the only distributed algorithms, but more are expected soon.
Quantum Random Number Generator - Apr 22, 2012.
Researchers at The Australian National University have developed the fastest random number generator in the world by using the quantum fluctuation in the vacuum, and put it online.
Social Media: Network Analytics meets Text Mining with KNIME - Apr 19, 2012.
Here is a powerful example of combining the results from the sentiment analysis with the results from the network analysis in order to position each user inside his/her community in terms of influence (leaders vs. followers) and sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative users).
Fujitsu Big Data software suite - Apr 25, 2012.
New software includes Interstage Big Data Parallel Processing Server, which builds upon Apache Hadoop, but is claimed to be five times faster.
Teradata and SAS partner on analytics appliance - Apr 25, 2012.
The appliance includes SAS data exploration, modeling and scoring tools combined with a specifically configured hardware and database software from Teradata.

Jobs

Risk Modeling Analyst II at Paychex, Rochester, NY - May 1, 2012.
Analytics and data mining projects, including scorecards and predictive models for Enterprise Risk Management, Marketing, Sales and Operations.
Research Associate (2 positions) at Merck, West Point, PA - Apr 26, 2012.
Develop statistical models and computational solutions using large-scale data manipulation, statistical analyses, data mining, visualization, and related analytical techniques.
Manager, Sales Analysis and Reporting at SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA - Apr 26, 2012.
Provide leadership and operational management to Customer Service to ensure the effective utilization of CRM (sales) tools and customer and product data.
Director of Predictive Analytics at Rezolve Group, Boston, MA - Apr 20, 2012.
Responsible for building predictive scoring modules that allow Student Aid Services to better serve its higher education clients via the identification and segmentation of unique student profiles.
Analytics Application Developer at Collective[i], New York, NY - Apr 19, 2012.
Design, develop, implement, and deploy our analytical applications and solutions. We are building a multi-tenant, high volume decision support ASP that connects marketing data and automates data analysis.

Competitions

PAKDD 2012 Data Mining Competition - Apr 20, 2012.
The competition has an open and student categories, and tasks include customer churn and win-back for a large telco, and analyzing correlation between job applications and economic indicators. Submissions due May 13.

Meetings

5 Reasons You Should Attend Data Science Summit 2012 - May 1, 2012.
An Extraordinary Lineup of Speakers, An Agenda Geared Towards You, Build Your Data Dream Team, and more awaits you at the EMC Data Science Summit 2012. Space is limited - Apply now!
Big Data for Enterprise USA (June 27-28), case studies from top companies - Apr 25, 2012.
Analytics experts from eBay, Intercontinental, Equifax, PG&E, and other companies will share successful case studies on using the power of big data to increase customer value and competitive advantage.
May 21: Minnesota Predictive & Social Media Analytics, Big Data Day - Apr 23, 2012.
The event is free and is organized by MinneAnalytics. Confirmed speakers include Robert Stephens, Founder Geek Squad, CTO BestBuy, and Robert Cooley, CTO, OptiMine Software.

Publications

Big Data and Predictive Analytics: Video series - Apr 24, 2012.
Watch this video series led by Fern Halper to learn more about analytics drivers/benefits, the changing user, operationalizing, Big data, and analytics in the cloud.
Gravity Defying ROI for Analytics - May 1, 2012.
Nucleus looked at ROI for analytics and identified four stages, each providing tremendous benefits to the organization with ROI that climbs from 188% in the initial stage to 1,209% in the fully implemented predictive phase.
Top KDnuggets tweets, Apr 23-29: 30+ R tutorials, 1M Songs challenge, Online ML classes - Apr 30, 2012.
30+ R Tutorials from around the World, Million Songs - predict what people will listen to, Review of online Machine Learning classes and more.
A Very Short History of Data Science - Apr 27, 2012.
Gil Press is researching the origin and evolution of data science as a discipline and a profession and collects some significant milestones.
Top KDnuggets tweets, Apr 16-22 - Apr 23, 2012.
What data scientists do for fun; From Data Mining to Big Data and Beyond; Word cloud alternatives in ; Data gravity principle
Hans Rosling on Time 100 Most Influential People in the World - Apr 22, 2012.
He is an economist who has pionereed amazing GapMinder visualizations that show connections between health and wealth across time. His GapMinder software is freely available.

News Briefs

MetaMarkets crunches your big numbers, raises $15M - Apr 30, 2012.
MetaMarkets originally analyzed prices for online ads, but expanded to offer its analytics as data science-as-a-service.
Sports by the Numbers: Predicting Winners and Losers - Apr 30, 2012.
Wharton statistics professor looks at correlation between the team salary and results in baseball, football, hockey, soccer, and basketball and find only one sport with a strong correlation. He also finds where defense is a more productive investment than offense.
NYU Stern Announces New Masters in Business Analytics - Apr 27, 2012.
New degree will be offered in Shanghai and at NYU Washington Square campus beginning in May 2013.
IBM Advances Big Data Analytics with Acquisition of Vivisimo - Apr 25, 2012.
Vivisimo is the leading independent provider of enterprise search solutions, across structured and unstructured data. Vivisimo started as a search engine with automatic clustering of topics.
Big-data investors look for the next Splunk - Apr 24, 2012.
Other potential big-data IPOs include Tableau, Cloudera, Couchbase, and Hortonworks.
SAS Global Forum 2012 and SAS News - Apr 23, 2012.
SAS LASR(tm) Analytic Server speeds big data decision making; Fraud detection and fraud investigation with SAS tools; Teradata partnership and more news from SAS GF12.
Splunk has a Big-Data IPO - Apr 21, 2012.
Splunk, which specializes in turning machine-generated big data into real-time insights had a spectacular IPO, rising 109% on the first day of trading, despite not making any profits so far.

CFP - Calls for Papers

MLG-2012: Mining and Learning with Graphs, due May 7
ACML: Fourth Asian Conference on Machine Learning, due May 8
SoftwareMining: The First International Workshop on Software Mining , due May 14
SPSN-2012: Security and Privacy in Social Networks, due May 26
IJWS-SWSM: Social Web Search and Mining, due Jun 1
IEEE ICDM 2012: The 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, due Jun 18
ICDM 2012 demos: The 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Demo Proposals, due Aug 10
ICDM 2012 tutorials: The 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Tutorial Proposals, due Aug 10

Quote

Is Big Data overheating? In addition to BigDataWeek, there are at least 8 analytics/big data meetings just in the week of Apr 23-29

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro