KDnuggets™ News 14:n34, Dec 17

Features

• New Poll: Will Artificial Intelligence be a threat to Humanity? - Dec 12, 2014.
  New KDnuggets Poll is asking - Will Artificial Intelligence be a threat to Humanity? Please vote if you are human.
• Most Demanded Data Science and Data Mining Skills - Dec 15, 2014.
  Our analysis of most demanded data scientist skills shows that Data Science is a team effort focused on business analytics, with top 5 platform skills being SQL, Python, R, SAS, and Hadoop.
• Cartoon: Unexpected Data Science Recommendations - Dec 16, 2014.
  New KDnuggets cartoon examines an unexpected shopping recommendation from Big Data and machine learning algorithms.
• Top KDnuggets Analytics, Big Data, Data Science stories in 2014 - Dec 16, 2014.
  Top KDnuggets stories in 2014 had several themes - Deep Learning; Data Scientist career, education, and salary; Resources for learning Data Science, especially R and Python, and polls on popular languages for data science and data mining.

Software

• IBM Watson Analytics vs. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Part 1) - Dec 16, 2014.
  IBM Watson Analytics prototype seeks to abstract away data science, taking ordinary natural language queries and answering them based on the content of uploaded datasets. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning goes the opposite route, streamlining existing data mining methodology for fast results and integration with MS's other cloud services.
• Open Source Big Data Analytics Platform - Dec 14, 2014.
  Download IKANOW open source analytics platform for FREE and start analyzing structured and unstructured data sources. Great for cyber, social, and crisis use cases.
• 16 NoSQL, NewSQL Databases To Watch - Dec 15, 2014.
  NoSQL and NewSQL databases have become much more important with the proliferation of big, mobile, and networked data, and these sixteen database solutions are some of the biggest up-and-comers.

Opinions

• 8 Things to Check when you analyze Twitter data - Dec 16, 2014.
  A review of biases and issues on large scale studies of human behavior in social media discussed by a recent paper published on Science.
• Analyze And Visualize Chatter from Nigeria Elections 2015 - Dec 16, 2014.
  A visual listening open data platform helps to see the chatter around upcoming Nigeria 2015 election - facts, ideas, topics, issues, statistics, queries - in a bare minimum of words and beautiful imagery.
• Open Innovation in the Age of Big Data - Dec 15, 2014.
  Open platforms for data analysis are more important than ever with big data and increasing access to heterogeneous data sources for analysts.
• Our Iceberg is Melting.. Now where is that Data Scientist? - Dec 15, 2014.
  Marketing analytics teams could improve their effectiveness by employing a marketing effectiveness strategy similar to that used by penguins dealing with their iceberg melting.
• 2015 Predictions - What's Next for Data Scientists? - Dec 12, 2014.
  What's next for data scientists in 2015 - new areas they will focus on - cyber threats to fraud detection - and how the expectations for this profession will change.

Interviews

• Spatial Data Platform from SpaceCurve for Real-Time Operational Intelligence - Dec 16, 2014.
  SpaceCurve Spatial Data Platform will deliver strong spatial and temporal analytics capabilities. SpaceCurve CEO Dane Coyer and CTO Andrew Rogers tell us more.
• KDnuggets Interview: Paul Zikopoulos, IBM on Big Data Opportunities and Challenges - Dec 14, 2014.
  We discuss the value of Big Data for SMBs, how Cognitive will impact Big Data, IBM's distinction from competition, significant trends and more.
• KDnuggets Interview: Paul Zikopoulos, IBM on Why Big Data needs Polyglots - Dec 13, 2014.
  We discuss why not to focus on a single technology in Big Data, prevalent myths, what IBM & Twitter partnership means for the world, and current state of data governance.
• Interview: Daqing Zhao, Macys.com on Building Effective Data Models for Marketing - Dec 11, 2014.
  We discuss the challenges in identifying the fair price of ad media, recommendations for building effective models for online marketing, unique challenges of Mobile channel, selection of Big Data tools, and more.
• Interview: Daqing Zhao, Macys.com on Advanced Analytics for Marketing in the Big Data era - Dec 10, 2014.
  We discuss Analytics at Macys.com, comparison of advanced analytics with traditional BI, building data models for scalability, problem of data models becoming quickly obsolete and challenges in customer targeting.

Reports

• IIA 2015 Analytics Predictions - Dec 11, 2014.
  Highlights and discussion from IIA 2015 Analytics Predictions webinar, including Storytelling will be the hot new job in analytics; companies double investment in generating NEW and UNIQUE data, and how does one become an expert if entry-level work is automated?

News

• Top stories for Dec 7-13: Where Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science is Applied; Neural Networks, Brain, and Machine Learning - Dec 14, 2014.
  If programming languages were vehicles, what would be R, Python, SAS, and SQL?; Tableau Top 10 Trends in BI for 2015; Where Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science is applied; Geoff Hinton AMA: Neural Networks, the Brain, and Machine Learning.
• National Data Science Bowl: Predict Ocean Health - Dec 16, 2014.
  Enter the 1st ever National Data Science bowl, with 175K in prizes and build an algorithm to automate the plankton image identification across 100+ classes. Plankton are critically important to ecosystem, but traditional methods for measuring their populations are time consuming and cannot scale for large-scale studies.
• November 2014 Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining Acquisitions and Startups Activity - Dec 11, 2014.
  November 2014 acquisitions, startups, and company activity in Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science: Target buys Powered Analytics, Ve buys qunb, Sentient raises 100M+, Galvanize buys Zipfian Academy, Intel backs 16 startups.
• FICO Analytics Competition: Helping Santa Helpers - Dec 11, 2014.
  FICO is sponsoring a Kaggle competition to optimize Santa's scheduling algorithm. Competitors can win in multiple categories and the best solution using FICO Xpress Optimization Suite will receive a special prize.
• Australia Analytics Professionals Skills and Salary Report - Dec 10, 2014.
  The Institute of Analytics Professionals has published a report showing that in Australia data science recruitment is challenging, salaries are high, social analytics is hot, and there are business challenges that analysts face.

Webcasts and Webinars

• Upcoming Webcasts on Analytics, Big Data, Data Science - Dec 16 and beyond - Dec 15, 2014.
  Top Data Science Trends for 2015, How EAT Club is using analytics, Data Mining: Failure To Launch, and more.

Jobs

• TXU Energy: Senior Statistical Modeling Analyst - Dec 16, 2014.
  Analyzing and developing improvements to business processes, identifying and facilitating the creation of appropriate reporting and definition around each function, managing and integrating processes relating to operations, and delivering an improved customer experience.
• Microsoft: Principal Data Scientist - Dec 16, 2014.
  At Azure Machine Learning, our vision is to make machine learning cloud technology accessible to every enterprise, data scientist, developer, information worker, consumer, and device anywhere in the world.
• JCA: BI Engineer, Business Intelligence Group - Dec 12, 2014.
  JCA provides strategic consulting to the world leading nonprofits. BI Engineer will work with JCA Answers, JCA analytics, and other Enterprise BI systems and services.
• Knewton: Data Scientist - Dec 10, 2014.
  Knewton is on a mission to personalize education for students around the world - many education organization already use the Knewton platform to power course materials that dynamically adapt to each student unique needs.
• Boeing: Advanced Technologist in Text Analytics, level 2/3 - Dec 10, 2014.
  Our organization partners with Boeing business units to advance towards widespread application of modeling, simulation, and analytics across the lifecycle of our aerospace and defense products.

Academic and Research positions

• TU Darmstadt or RK U. Heidelberg: PhD-level researchers in Machine Learning or related areas - Dec 14, 2014.
  New Research Training Group "Adaptive Information Preparation from Heterogeneous Sources" at TU Darmstadt and RK University Heidelberg is filling 3-year positions for researchers in Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning, and related areas.
• Aalto: Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) in Machine Learning - Dec 10, 2014.
  Join a leading dept. whose focus includes machine learning, computational inference, data mining, big data analysis, and smart applications in the society and sciences.

Top Tweets

• Top KDnuggets tweets, Dec 7-14 - Dec 15, 2014.
  Which one is the bunny? Google new CAPTCHA bot-trap trains #AI;
  O'Reilly Data Scientist Salary and Tools Survey 2014;
  Microsoft brings the power of #MachineLearning to Office Online;
  ... and more.
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Dec 10-11 - Dec 12, 2014.
  Which one is the bunny? Google new CAPTCHA trains #AI;
  Data Scientist Salary/Tools Survey finds #BigData scientists earn more;
  Microsoft brings the power of #MachineLearning to Office Online;
  ... and more.
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Dec 8-9 - Dec 10, 2014.
  On the effects Analytics bring to enterprises;
  Anyone Can Now Use IBM #WatsonAnalytics to Crunch Data For Free;
  Economists are NOT nonpartisan - @FiveThirtyEight quantifies their bias;
  ... and more.

CFP - Calls for Papers

• Due Dec 21, Trends in Data Analytics , Special issue of IT Professional
• Due Jan 8, The Int. Conf. on Digital Information Processing, Data Mining, and Wireless Communications (DIPDMWC2015) , Dubai, UAE. Jan 28-30, 2015
• Due Jan 10, Big Data and Data Mining Challenges on IoT and Pervasive Systems (BigD2M) , London, UK. June, 2015
• Due Jan 16, DBKDA 2015, The Seventh Int. Conf. on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications , Rome, Italy. May 24-29, 2015
• Due Jan 22, INNS Conf. on Big Data 2015: New approaches to solving hard Big Data problems, Special sessions, tutorials, workshops , San Francisco, CA, USA.
• Due Mar 1, CYBCONF 2015: 2nd IEEE Int. Conf. on Cybernetics , Gdynia Poland. 24-26 June 2015
• Due Apr 15, The 5th IEEE Int. (pending) Conf. on Big Data and Cloud Computing (BDCloud 2015) , Dalian, China. Aug 26-28, 2015

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