Features

Over 700 data miners have attended KDD-2005, the 11th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Chicago, IL (http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigkdd/kdd2005/) .

The conference was held at a Hyatt Regency in the center of downtown Chicago, and the first day saw overflights by jet planes from the Chicago Air and Sea show.

The excellent research program consisted of 40 full papers and 36 poster papers, selected from 358 submissions. Equally impressive industrial track papers (14 presentations and 11 posters) were selected from the additional additional 57 submissions.

Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Yahoo Research Labs, gave a first invited talked about Incentive Networks, modeling online settings in which multiple participants in a network help each other find information. In this joint work with Jon Kleinberg, he showed how to find optimal behaviour and why it is good to ask more than 2 friends when you need advice.

The second invited talk was Gian Fulgoni, the CEO of comScore, a company which recruits consumer panels and analyzes their web surfing to provides extraordinary insights into consumer behaviour. While the data is anonymized, it allows prediction of aggregate patterns with gredat accuracy, such as the total of sales of a particular e-commerce company or even some of the Labor Dept. Statistics.

Prof. Albert-L�szl� Barab�si gave a talk about his work on Networks complexity. He found network laws that describe systems as diverse as the cell, the World Wide Web or the society, and the emergence of most networks is driven by self-organizing processes that are governed by simple but generic laws.

There were also 2 panels, 4 tutorials, and 9 workshops.

See full report, including KDD-Cup 2005 results, in an upcoming issue of SIGKDD Explorations, http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/explorations/