KDnuggets™ News 12:n18, Aug 2

Features (7) | Courses, Events (1) | Meetings (1) | Jobs (7) | Academic (2) | Competitions (1) | Publications (6) | NewsBriefs (3) | CFP (6) | Quote

Features

• Poll results: Top languages for analytics/data mining programming - Aug 1, 2012.
  R is now used by over 50% of data miners. R, Python, and SQL were the most popular programming languages. Python, Lisp/Clojure, and Unix tools showest the highest growth in 2012, while Java and MATLAB slightly declined in popularity.
• Predicting the London Olympics Medal Count and the Math behind It - Jul 27, 2012.
  Is it possible to predict how many medals each nation will win? Some surprising factors emerge as predictors of the number of medals.
• Nominations: 2012 IEEE ICDM Research Contributions and Outstanding Service Awards - Aug 1, 2012.
  The IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award is for influential research contributions to the field of data mining. The Outstanding Service Award is for made major service contributions that promoted data mining as a field and ICDM as premier research conference in data mining. Nominations due Aug 24.
• Online Graduate Certificate in BI/Analytics from Nova - Jul 27, 2012.
  The curriculum gives students the knowledge and skills to effectively use data for competitive advantage, focusing on business analytics and data mining techniques for organizational decision-making. Enrolling now - Fall term starts Aug 20.
• Additions to KDnuggets Directory in July - Aug 1, 2012.
  Yelp academic dataset, UH Data Mining Hypertextbook and Course, GraphChi, PredPol, new meetings, publications, software, blogs.
• Top news, jobs in July: Data Mining In Excel book; Predictive Analytics on Hadoop - Aug 1, 2012.
  Data Mining In Excel book draft (free download); July 19 Webinar: Predictive Analytics on Hadoop; Big Predictions About Big Data
  Top jobs: Research Analyst: Social Media, Text Mining, Big Data, Semantic Search at Sabre; Senior Data Modeling Analyst at CNA Insurance.
• Top news for Jul 22-28: New Poll: Languages used for analytics; Predicting Olympics Medal Count - Jul 29, 2012.
  New Poll: Languages used for analytics/DM; Predicting the London Olympics Medal Count and the Math behind It;
  Top jobs: Data Mining Research Engineer - Algorithms; Big Data/HPC at Bosch, Palo Alto, CA.

Courses, Events

• Short course: Ten Hot Ideas for Learning from Data (SLDM 3), Sep 18-19, New York, NY - Aug 1, 2012.
  This two-day course from Stanford Professors Hastie and Robert Tibshirani gives a detailed overview of statistical models for data mining, inference and prediction, emphasizing the tools useful for tackling modern-day data analysis problems.

Meetings

• Analytics 2012 Conference, Oct 8-9 - Jul 30, 2012.
  Analytics 2012: Las Vegas, Oct 8-9: Hone your skills, learn new techniques and widen your understanding of this complex and ever-changing field. Exclusive KDnuggets Discount.

Jobs

• Senior Applied Researcher at Bing, Microsoft, Bellevue, WA - Aug 1, 2012.
  If you are interested in turning data into actionable insights and have what it takes to work with our highly talented team on challenging analysis projects then please contact us.
• Sr. Advanced Analytics Analyst at Steelcase, Grand Rapids, MI - Aug 1, 2012.
  Help executives and business functions in addressing complex problems and new business opportunities by using data mining techniques and mathematical/statistical modeling.
• Senior Analyst (Systems and Methods) at US Treasury, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Vienna, VA - Jul 31, 2012.
  Join the team that leads preventing and detecting terrorist financing, money laundering, and other financial crime. Apply by Aug 14, 2012.
• Market Analyst - Temporary at PIMCO, New York, NY - Jul 30, 2012.
  Support both the Segmentation & Analysis and Email Strategy functions to monitor, analyze and manage contact data as it relates to marketing programs and activities.
• Director of Analytics at Stylitics, New York, NY - Jul 29, 2012.
  Stylitics is a consumer insights company that is unlocking a new stream of data on what people are wearing and buying, in real-time. Director of Analytics will be in charge of customer and business insights and predictive modeling.
• Machine Learning Scientist at EA, Redwood City, CA - Jul 26, 2012.
  Use machine learning techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems in the gaming domain; analyze and extract key insights from EA gamer and gameplay data, and more
• Principal Software Engineer, Data Engine at Informatica, Redwood City, CA - Jul 25, 2012.
  As part of the team in Redwood City you will be designing and implementing the next generation platform for complex heterogeneous systems and applications involving cutting edge technologies.

Academic/Research positions

• PhD student position on "Spatial Statistics Applied to Neuroscience" at Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain - Jul 27, 2012.
  PhD student position on "Spatial Statistics Applied to Neuroscience" within the Cajal Blue Brain project and the Computational Intelligence Group.
• Open Postdoc/Research Assistant Positions at NTU, Singapore - Jul 27, 2012.
  Work and research on one of these topics: geo-textual data management, location based social networks, mobile activity recognition, or data mining and text mining.

Competitions

• Do you have a method for forecasting current events? Team DAGGRE wants you - Jul 31, 2012.
  Do you have a method for forecasting or statistical inference which can be applied to current political, economic, health and technology events? Join Team DAGGRE.

Publications

• On Point: Political Data Mining - Jul 31, 2012.
  The campaigns and 'dark money' groups are spending a whole lot of money to target each of us on our computers. Different voter, different message. Is this a good thing?
• Big Predictions About Big Data - Jul 28, 2012.
  A look at Pew Research Big Data survey - will we find new and innovative ways to analyze, visualize, and extract value from massive and growing data sets, or will we become overwhelmed by information ?
• Authors of "Data Mining in Excel" respond - Jul 26, 2012.
  The posting of "Data Mining In Excel book draft (free download)" was so popular that drew the response of the book authors
• New book: Mining Heterogeneous Information Networks: Principles and Methodologies - Jul 25, 2012.
  The book investigate the principles and methods of mining heterogeneous information networks, by using a semi-structured heterogeneous information network model which leverages the rich semantics of typed nodes and links in a network and uncovers surprisingly rich knowledge from the network. Download available.
• Top KDnuggets tweets, July 26-29: Data Science definition; Dilbert on Big Data; Olympics forecasts - Jul 30, 2012.
  My definition of Data Science; Dilbert on #BigData: If we accept Big Data as our savior, we will be saved; Winning time forecast for 100m, London Olympics; 4 Excellent Big Data Case Studies; Authors of "Data Mining In Excel" respond
• Top KDnuggets tweets, July 23-25: New Poll: Analytics/Data Mining Languages? BigData for education - Jul 26, 2012.
  New KDnuggets Poll: What Languages you used for analytics/data mining? BigData for education: Lessons learned from MITx online courses; 35 Data sets for Math and Statistics Education; Machine learning for the impatient: algorithms tuning algorithms

News Briefs

• New Frontiers in SETI Research - Jul 30, 2012.
  Gerry Harp, who has taken over Jill Tarter's job as research director at the SETI Institute, has high hopes for the hunt for alien life
• With SAS Analytics, Castle Worldwide boosts confidence in testing results - Jul 30, 2012.
  Castle Worldwide uses SAS Analytics to help meet the moral and legal burdens of proof and the measurement accuracy required for standardized tests. Castle VP Robert Pedigo said, "Using open-source software such as R was out of the question - we couldn't guarantee a perfectly repeatable outcome".
• Actuate, KXEN Launch Dash for Gold - Jul 29, 2012.
  Does per capita wine consumption affect who stands on the podium? Dash for Gold provides intuitive dashboards to analyze medal counts and uses KXEN to predict outcomes

CFP - Calls for Papers

• COMAD: 18th International Conference on Management of Data, due Aug 10
• ICDM '12-w: ICDM'12 workshops, due Aug 10
• BI2012: Behavior Informatics, due Aug 15
• WIN-2012: The Workshop on Information in Networks, due Aug 20
• ICML 2013 Cycle I: ICML 2012 (Cycle I submissions), due Oct 1
• BICoB-2013: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, due Oct 28

Quote

Dilbert's boss on #BigData: If we accept Big Data as our savior (in our servers?), we will be saved (from Bankruptcy?)