KDnuggets™ News 13:n02, Jan 30

Features

• Poll Results: How long to become a good data scientist ( comments) - Jan 29, 2013.
  KDnuggets readers think it takes about 5 years to become a good data scientist, with AU/NZ taking the longest view and Latin American analysts the most optimistic. Asia, North America, and Western Europe show surprising unanimity. Developing the analytic intuition, learning to automate, and data cleansing are among the top obstacles.
• GEQuest: 2 Big Data Science Quests on Kaggle - Jan 18, 2013.
  GEQuest: focusing on making flying more efficient, and improve the patient experience, 2 big quests have $350,000 in prizes, and are a great opportunity for Data Scientists, Data Visualizers, Lean Startups, and App Designers to show their stuff. Hurry - deadlines in February!
• Free Online Training with Preorder of a major new Predictive Analytics book - Jan 28, 2013.
  In this rich, entertaining book "Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die", former Columbia U. professor and Predictive Analytics World founder Eric Siegel reveals the power and perils of prediction. Take advantage of this unique order - free online training with preorder of the book.
• Big Data Impact on Your Earnings: 2012 Data Professional Salary Survey Results - Jan 17, 2013.
  How will the Big Data trend impact your job security and earnings? Find out answers to these and many other questions in the 2012 Data Professional Salary Survey, available at no cost but for a limited time.
• Webinar (Jan 31): Maximize the value of customer data - Jan 16, 2013.
  Join the panel of experts for a discussion on data analytics for lifetime one to one relationships with customers that optimize profitability; how to present data in an accessible format to make the right decisions in real-time; how new technologies are allowing fast and accurate analysis.
• PAW - Predictive Analytics World, Apr 14-19, 2013, San Francisco - Jan 17, 2013.
  Catch case studies from premier organizations such as AAA, Dell, HP, IBM, Monster, Orbitz, Wells Fargo and more. From beginners to the most advanced, PAW features something for all who are seeking to expand their skills and learn the latest and greatest in analytics.
• Big Data is Falling into the Trough of Disillusionment ( comments) - Jan 24, 2013.
  Gartner Research Director uses the technology maturity curve to argue that Big Data is already falling into the trough of disillusionment. Many of her clients most advanced with Hadoop are getting disillusioned.
• KDnuggets Cartoons on Big Data, Data Mining, Predictive Analytics ( comments) - Jan 26, 2013.
  Here is a collection of KDnuggets and other cartoons taking a less serious look at Big Data, Data Mining, and Predictive Analytics.
• Top news for Jan 20-26: Book: R and Data Mining; Big Data is Falling into the Trough of Disillusionment - Jan 27, 2013.
  Book: R and Data Mining: Examples and Case Studies; Big Data is Falling into the Trough of Disillusionment; KDnuggets Exclusive: Interview with Rayid Ghani, Chief Scientist Obama 2012 Campaign;
  Top jobs: Data Mining Research Analyst at WIL, Toronto; Statistics/Machine Learning Positions at ATnT Labs - Research
• Top news for Jan 13-19: Exclusive: Interview with Rayid Ghani, Chief Scientist Obama 2012 Campaign - Jan 20, 2013.
  KDnuggets Exclusive: Interview with Rayid Ghani, Chief Scientist Obama 2012 Campaign; New Poll: How long does it take to become a good data scientist?;
  Top jobs: Applied Researcher at Microsoft; Data Analysis Consultant at Megaputer

Software

• Import.io automates online data scraping - Jan 28, 2013.
  Import.io uses point and click interface to reduce data extraction from days to minutes. Automatic normalisation allows mixing of data sources, making data instantly comparable and accessed through API calls, or spreadsheets.
• Rexer Analytics 2013 Data Miner Survey - Jan 24, 2013.
  Data Analysts, Predictive Modelers, Data Scientists, Data Miners, and all other types of analytic professionals, students, and academics: Please participate in the Rexer Analytics 2013 Data Miner Survey.
• BayesiaLab 5.1: Analytics, Data Mining, Modeling and Simulation - Jan 17, 2013.
  BayesiaLab raises the benchmark in the field of analytics and data mining. The improvements range from small practical features to entirely new visualization techniques that can transform your understanding of complex problems.
• PMML FAQ: Predictive Model Markup Language - Jan 16, 2013.
  An update on PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language), de facto standard to represent predictive solutions. With PMML 4.1, all the capabilities available for data pre-processing were also made available for post-processing.

Courses, Events

• FREE VIDEO COURSE: Accounts Receivable Recovery and Collections Analytics - Jan 22, 2013.
  Enroll in the Accounts Receivable Recovery and Collections Analytics 4-part video course and learn how to use collections analytics to improve your A/R recovery.
• Introduction to Data Science - free online course at Syracuse iSchool - Jan 28, 2013.
  The Syracuse iSchool perspective approaches data science with a view of the full data life cycle. This free course starts in late February, lasting four weeks, and enrollment is limited to the first 500 students, so hurry!

Webcasts

• On-Demand Webcast: Analytically Speaking featuring John Sall - Jan 25, 2013.
  SAS co-founder and executive VP John Sall talks about the discipline of statistics as a framework for uncovering phenomena, on the joy of discovery and the impact of statistics on our lives.
• WCAI Research Opportunity/Webinar (Feb 6): Analysis of Coalition Loyalty Programs - Jan 20, 2013.
  This coalition loyalty program offers a unique insight into consumer behavior. Learn more during Feb 6 webinar and submit your proposals afterwards.
• StatSoft Webinar (Feb 19): Reduce Journal Research from Weeks to Hours with STATISTICA Text Miner - Jan 17, 2013.
  Can a recommender service be created to automatically identify a few relevant articles from many thousands ? This webinar shows a successful case study with STATISTICA Data Miner and Text Miner.

Jobs

• Data Mining Researcher at Stevens Capital Management LP, Radnor, PA - Jan 29, 2013.
  Stevens Capital Management LP, a $3+ billion multi-strategy hedge fund, seeks a researcher to apply advanced data mining and machine learning methods to financial market.
• Data Scientist at LivingSocial, Washington, DC - Jan 28, 2013.
  Are you interested in impacting the next generation of data products for local e-commerce? The LivingSocial Data Science team is looking for highly qualified candidates to help inform decision-making and solve business problems with data.
• Lead Data Scientist at Stealth Startup, Palo Alto, CA - Jan 27, 2013.
  Build and lead small team in designing breakthrough technologies for revealed preference studies of consumers. The ideal candidate will have a keen interest in the study of human choice behavior and changing habits in the digital world.
• Staff Scientist at FirstFuel, Lexington, MA - Jan 25, 2013.
  FirstFuel Software is the energy intelligence company that helps utilities engage their commercial customers and rapidly achieve energy efficiency across commercial building portfolios.
• Manager of Analytics at NDBH, Kansas City, MO - Jan 24, 2013.
  We provide a full range of proven practices to help individuals attain healthier and more balanced lifestyles. The Manager will work on expanding and strengthening the data analytics, EAP Payment Processing. and Claims Auditing capabilities.
• Data Mining Research Analyst at WIL, Toronto, ON, Canada - Jan 23, 2013.
  Waterfront International, specializing in developing computer based statistical trading strategies, is looking for a highly talented Data Mining Research Analyst with a history of exceptional achievement.
• Senior Analyst, Decision Analytics - Healthcare Vertical at EXL Service, Jersey City, NJ or New York, NY or Hartford, CT - Jan 18, 2013.
  A Senior Analyst focus is on end service delivery of analysis and guiding junior staff. EXL Decision Analytics group helps companies tease meaning out of their data to optimize business processes
• Engagement Manager, Decision Analytics - Healthcare Vertical at EXL Service (Decision Analytics Group), Jersey City, NJ or New York, NY or Hartford, CT - Jan 18, 2013.
  EXL Decision Analytics group helps companies tease meaning out of their data to optimize business processes. We are a rapidly growing company that offers exciting career opportunities in the area of analytics
• Lead Analytics Engineer at Knewton, New York, NY - Jan 17, 2013.
  You'll be building a scalable, near real time analytics platform that brings insight to one of the world's most interesting data sets. You will be responsible for providing technical leadership and direction to a team that is foundational to Knewton success.
• Applied Researcher at Microsoft, Bellevue, WA - Jan 16, 2013.
  Join the Bing Data Mining Analysis team, composed of extremely talented and engaged individuals who are experts at extracting insights from data.
• Research Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, Bellevue, WA - Jan 16, 2013.
  Want to work on defining what it means for a search engine to be "relevant"? You'll be responsible for defining the evaluation methodology to answer that question for the Bing Core Relevance team.
• Data Analysis Consultant at Megaputer Intelligence, Bloomington, IN - Jan 15, 2013.
  Create data analysis and reporting solutions for Megaputer customers with the help of PolyAnalyst(tm) platform: experimental, proof-of-concept, implementation, and production projects. Develop successful long-term relationships with customers.

Academic/Research positions

• Full/Associate/Assistant Professors in Big Data Analytics at CUHK, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong - Jan 25, 2013.
  CUHK Faculty of Engineering seeks faculty at all levels in the interdisciplinary area of Big Data Analytics, which is a new strategic research initiative.
• Statistics and Machine Learning Positions at AT&T Labs - Research, Bedminster, NJ; New York, NY; and San Francisco, CA - Jan 24, 2013.
  Full time research positions in the area of Machine Learning and Data Mining for junior and senior scientists at one of the premier industrial research laboratories in the world.
• Senior Research Fellow at REC, Wroclaw, Poland - Jan 24, 2013.
  Work on an exciting project entitled "Computational Intelligence Platform for Evolving and Robust Predictive Systems (INFER)" funded by the European Commission. This is a joint project with Bournemouth U. (UK), Evonik Industries (Germany), and Research and Engineering Center, Poland.
• Postdoc, Machine Learning/Information Visualisation at UCLouvain, Belgium - Jan 23, 2013.
  The U. catholique de Louvain invites applications for a 2-year postdoc position in Machine Learning/Information Visualisation, beginning July 1, 2013.
• Zalando Doctoral Scholarship on Recommender Systems and Personalization at TU-Darmstadt, Germany - Jan 16, 2013.
  Zalando is a rapidly growing company, aiming at creating the best online fashion experience, and working on cutting edge personalization technologies and recommendations. This 36-month position will be at TU Darmstadt and will work closely with Zalando.

Competitions

• Innocentive: Creative Use Cases of Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge - Jan 26, 2013.
  New use cases for Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge content, tools, and APIs to enable users to engage in creative new behaviors.
• IEEE Geospatial Data Fusion Contest - Jan 21, 2013.
  The Contest, which helps connecting students and researchers around the world, evaluates existing methodologies at the research or operational level to solve remote sensing problems using data from various sensors.
• BioNLP Shared Task: Text Mining for Biology Competition - Jan 19, 2013.
  The BioNLP Shared Task series represents a community-wide trend in text-mining for biology toward fine-grained information extraction (IE). Datasets are now available.
• SBP 2013: Big Data Challenge - Jan 17, 2013.
  MIT Human Dynamics laboratory will supply several mobile datasets with dynamics of several communities. Open-ended challenge includes proposing applications to demonstrate the value of these datasets, how to extend the experiments, and agent-based or system dynamics models of the communities.

Publications

• How Obama 2012 campaign mastered analytics of persuasion ( comments) - Jan 29, 2013.
  Analytics expert Eric Siegel opens a window on the new marketing technologies of persuasion modeling and predictive analytics successfully used in the Obama re-election campaign.
• Real scientists make their own data - what about data scientists? Twitter conversation ( comments) - Jan 28, 2013.
  Twitter conversation sparked by my tweet - Real scientists make their own data - but does it apply to data scientists?
• How Particle Physics Is Improving Recommendation Engines - Jan 27, 2013.
  Some items are adversely affected when too many people use them. Surprisingly, the same physics that govern the behaviour of photons and electrons may also improve online shopping recommendations and help avoid crowds.
• Big Data and Apache Hadoop Adoption - Jan 23, 2013.
  While open-source Apache Hadoop can be a powerful platform for handling big data, deploying and managing this key technology is not without its challenges.
• Global Warming Prediction Project ( comments) - Jan 22, 2013.
  KnowledgeMiner data-driven predictions of global warming predict smaller rise than IPCC. IPCC scientists say their projections are more accurate. See for yourself who is right.
• Book: R and Data Mining: Examples and Case Studies - Jan 21, 2013.
  This book contains examples, code, and data for decision trees, random forest, regression, clustering, outlier detection, time series analysis, association rules, text mining and social network analysis and three real-world case studies.
• The Big Data Landscape, 2013 Edition ( comments) - Jan 18, 2013.
  The The Big Data Landscape includes over 100 companies and Big Data vendors of all sizes, public and private market investors, and technology buyers.
• Text mining for biological and health effects of electromagnetic fields - Jan 15, 2013.
  Meta-analysis of published literature found unexpected beneficial and adverse health effects of electromagnetic fields. The text and data mining aspects of this work may be of interest to researchers in text mining and bioinformatics.
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jan 24-27: Can Twitter Predict the Future? Pentagon says maybe; 25 cartoons look at the funny side of Bi gData - Jan 28, 2013.
  Can Twitter Predict the Future? Pentagon says maybe; 25 cartoons look at the funny side of #BigData; Google rival? Common Crawl, a free database of the entire web; Data Visualization for R packages at Github
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jan 21-23: Free BigData education, Coursera "pseudo-degree"; What is Hadoop, MapReduce, HDFS - Jan 24, 2013.
  Free #BigData education, including Coursera "pseudo-degree" program for Data Science ; Free #BigData Education: Technical perspective - Learn what is Hadoop, MapReduce, HDFS, Pig; New Book: R and Data Mining: Examples and Case Studies; How significant is columnar storage for Big data analytics - an explanation
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jan 17-20: Data Scientist positions at the CIA; Amazing visualization of Lionel Messi world-record 91 goals - Jan 21, 2013.
  Data Scientist positions at the CIA; Amazing visualization of Lionel Messi world-record 91 goals? DATA MINING CUP, a leading competition for students; The Big Data Landscape, 2013 Edition
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jan 14-16: Machine Learning humor: "Love Thy Nearest Neighbor"; What is a zetta-byte, visualized - Jan 17, 2013.
  Machine Learning humor on a T-shirt: "Love Thy Nearest Neighbor"; BigData - what is a zetta-byte, visualized; How to find useful external data (key question for most data mining tasks); Graduate Programs in #BigData Analytics, Data Science - updated

News Briefs

• SAS achieves record revenue of $2.87 B in 2012 - Jan 25, 2013.
  Revenue grew worldwide despite continuing economic uncertainty. The Americas generated 47% of total revenue; Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) 41 percent; and Asia Pacific 12 percent. SAS reinvested 25 percent of 2012 revenue into research and development.
• Global Big Data Market by 2018 - Jan 23, 2013.
  Global Big Data Market is expected to reach $48.3B by 2018; North America is expected to maintain its lead position in terms of revenues till 2018, with about 54.5% share, followed by Europe, but Asia-Pacific will grow the fastest.
• RapidMiner 5.3: New analytics, data sources, marketplace - Jan 22, 2013.
  New RapidMiner delivers more powerful data analysis, access to more data sources, and ability to commercialize extensions via new marketplace.
• DeveloperWeek Analytics Awards - Jan 18, 2013.
  Here are top innovators in Analytics-as-a-service, SQL Technologies, NoSQL, Big Data, Consumer Data, Hadoop, App Analytics, and Social Data, as chosen by DeveloperWeek community.

CFP - Calls for Papers

• WIMS'13 : Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics, due Jan 30
• ASONAM'13w: ASONAM 2013 workshop proposals, due Feb 3
• ICML 2013-C3: Int. Conference on Machine Learning, Cycle III, due Feb 15
• UMUAI: Ubiquitous User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, due Mar 1
• DMCup : DATA MINING CUP, a leading competition for students (practicing data miners also welcome), due Mar 1
• NCTA 2013: Neural Computation Theory and Applications, due Mar 13
• DMLS 2013: Data Mining in Life Sciences, due Mar 20
• DMA 2013: Data Mining in Agriculture, due Mar 20
• DMM 2013: Data Mining in Marketing, due Mar 20
• ICDM-13 S/I: Industrial ICDM 2013, Short/Industrial Papers, due Mar 20
• DA 2013: DATA ANALYTICS 2013, due Apr 30
• DS-2013: DISCOVERY SCIENCE 2013, due May 11
• IEEE-BD-2013: IEEE Big Data 2013, due Jun 2

Quote

Svetlana Sicular, Gartner Research Director, Jan 22, 2013 Blog