KDnuggets™ News 10:n26, Nov 10

Features

IEEE ICDM Contest - Overview of Top Solutions, part 1 - Oct 29, 2010.
the authors revealed a good deal of important details about their approaches, but also kept the descriptions straightforward and concise, giving all of us an unprecedented opportunity to learn the essence of data mining know-how.
IEEE ICDM Traffic Contest - Solutions, part 2 - Nov 9, 2010.
Solutions of winners for Task 2: Traffic Jams and Task 3: GPS in the IEEE ICDM Contest: TomTom Traffic Prediction for Intelligent GPS Navigation.
One week to go - last chance to register for Predictive Analytics World London and save £100 - Nov 9, 2010.
One week to go - last chance to register for Predictive Analytics World London and make savings of £100 over the walk-in rate
The Software That Stares at Goats? [Pentagon Data Mining] - Nov 3, 2010.
The new project is called ADAMS, for Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales. Many of the problems with TIA are equally present with this ADAMS project - the idea is naive and misguided and it won't work.
Twitter Bot Auto-Debates Climate Change Critics - Nov 8, 2010.
the bot that scrapes Twitter for certain strings of words and then responds to the author of the offending tweet with a pre-packaged link containing a science-based counter-argument.
Most viewed items for Oct 31 - Nov 6 - Nov 7, 2010.
KXEN introduces predictive analytics first semantic layer; Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011;
Top jobs: Marketing Analysis Director at Chartis, New York, NY; Senior Researcher at Bing Mobile, Microsoft, Bellevue, WA;
Most viewed news, jobs in October - Nov 4, 2010.
Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011; Applying Euclidean Distance Clustering to Social Network Data;
Top jobs: Faculty in Info Systems / Data Mining at U. of Waterloo, Canada; Risk Management / Risk Analysis at Citi, NYC or Dallas.
Most viewed items for Oct 24-30 - Nov 1, 2010.
Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011; New Poll: Cloud Analytics;
Top jobs: VP of Customer Vision at ISO Innovative Analytics, San Francisco, NJ, Boston, Chicago, or remotely from home.; Director of Analytics at Mozilla Corporation, Mountain View, CA;
Additions to KDnuggets Directory in October - Nov 1, 2010.
Additions to KDnuggets Directory in Companies, Meetings, Software, Solutions, Websites sections

Courses (see also All Courses)

Learn How Experts Mine Data [Dec 6-10, Vegas; Feb 14-18, Orlando] - Nov 9, 2010.
Leverage highly valuable and impactful prospective insight from within your existing data through an intensive course series with over 20 years of innovation. Dec 6-10 in Las Vegas; Feb 14-18 in Orlando. Save up to 40% on Orlando registration by Nov 30!

Software (see also All Software)

R Extension for RapidMiner - Nov 8, 2010.
Two widely used analytics tools: RapidMiner and R - are now connected. RapidMiner offers a new R perspective consisting of the known R console together with the great plotting facilities of R.
Mendeley's DataTEL Data Set - Nov 7, 2010.
Mendeley has taken up the DataTEL challenge in order to provide recommendation system researchers with valuable data on users and their relationship with scientific literature.
Review: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2010 - Oct 29, 2010.
IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, Information Builders, SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy led the pack because of the completeness of not just BI, but overall information management functionality. Actuate came out as a Strong Performer on the heels of the Leaders.

Jobs (see also All Jobs)

Senior Researcher at Bing Mobile, Microsoft, Bellevue, WA - Nov 5, 2010.
strong engineering skills and experience in web based data mining, text mining, probabilistic and logical inference and NLP, not to mention passion for all things local, social and mobile.
Sr. Software Development Engineer, Fact Extraction at Amazon.com, Seattle, WA - Nov 5, 2010.
Amazon's Fact Extraction team is looking for exceptional experienced software engineers to develop algorithms and build systems to automatically solve a variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the Amazon Product Catalog
Senior Web Data Analyst at FT.com, New York, NY - Nov 4, 2010.
work at the forefront of our business with stakeholders across all departments (marketing, product development, advertising, finance, editorial, and IT) to plan and understand key product changes and their intended business impact.
Recommendation Engine / Java Engineer at theophilus, Inc., New York, NY, but also can work remotely from anywhere - Nov 4, 2010.
seeking an experienced part-time Java Developer with recommendation engine expertise to work on an exciting recommendation product which integrates advanced semantic analysis, search, social networks, and mobile devices such as the iPhone.
Research Engineer at PEPITe SA, Belgium - Nov 4, 2010.
develop creative industrial solutions based on data mining technologies and be part of our core technical team with aim to develop innovative solutions for the industry.
Staff/Senior Engineer / Scientist, Decision Support - Data Warehousing at UTC, East Hartford, CT - Nov 3, 2010.
enhance existing programs and provide technical expertise for decision support, diagnostics, prognostics and health monitoring system solutions, data mining methodologies, and anomaly detection methods. The additional ability to create and manage large databases and to provide data warehousing capabilities would be a plus
Staff/Senior Engineer / Scientist, Decision Support - Visualization at UTC, East Hartford, CT - Nov 3, 2010.
interact with UTC research and business units to enhance existing programs and provide technical expertise for decision support, diagnostics, prognostics and health monitoring system solutions, data mining methodologies, and anomaly detection methods.
Marketing Analysis Director at Chartis, New York, NY - Oct 29, 2010.
responsible for developing and implementing methods to address the most complex or emerging analytic challenges in marketing with the goal of driving improved business performance through customer insight
Modeling Consultant at Deloitte, Arlington, VA - Oct 29, 2010.
provide technical and analytical support in a consulting environment.
Director of Analytics at Mozilla Corporation, Mountain View, CA - Oct 28, 2010.
Head up the group's efforts to produce studies and make recommendations that both guide the development of our products and services and shed light on internet behavior more generally. The team currently consists of 6 engineers and 4 analysts who crunch data coming from roughly 25% of the internet, or more than 400M users.
Director, Analytics at ID Analytics, San Diego, CA - Oct 27, 2010.
responsible for leading the team of highly skilled scientists doing advanced analytical model and algorithm development. Director of Analytics provides key technical and business guidance to the team, and provides analytics support to the product, client service, sales and marketing groups.
Chief Scientist at ID Analytics, San Diego, CA - Oct 27, 2010.
serve as a corporate technical thought leader which includes advancing the Company's technologies to ensure that ID Analytics' solutions continue to solve business problems in the industry and remain leaders in the industry.

Academic/Research positions

Research Fellowship in Social Network Mining at U. of Porto, Portugal - Nov 8, 2010.
a research grant for potential PhD candidates; working in the "REACTION: Retrieval, Extraction, and Aggregation Computing Technology for Integrating and Organizing News" project

Meetings (see also All Meetings)

Registration now open for SAS Global Forum 2011 - Nov 9, 2010.
April 4-7 at Caesars, Las Vegas featuring 2.5 days of learning and networking, SAS Global Forum 2011 is the premier event for SAS professionals worldwide.
Data Analytics Summit, New York City, Nov 18 - Nov 9, 2010.
Learn how organizations are managing growing data volumes, running advanced analytics, getting deeper insights into their data, and utilizing new technologies like MPP data warehouses, MapReduce, and advanced analytic frameworks

Audio/Video

Bloomberg TV: Sergey Brin & Larry Page - Nov 2, 2010.
Bloomberg documentary follows Google co-founders from their first meeting at Stanford to the new media mega-company on a collision course with old media businesses of newspapers, books, movies and television.

Publications

Forbes on The Data Analytics Boom - Nov 9, 2010.
A multitude of converging facts has given rise to numbers-based decision-making.
Book: VisMaster: Visual Analytics - Mastering the Information Age - Nov 7, 2010.
(book download available). The aim of VisMaster was to create a research roadmap that outlines the current state of visual analytics across many disciplines, and to describe the next steps that have to be taken to foster a strong visual analytics community, thus enabling the development of advanced visual analytic applications.
How voters turned out on Facebook - Nov 5, 2010.
By looking at those users who state their political affiliation on Facebook, we can see a significant discrepancy between the Democrats and Republicans
Keys To Web Analytics Maturity: Structure, Process, Hyperfocus - Nov 4, 2010.
We need a different process to help create data driven organizations. And we need a structured approach to help guide that process. The answer to those two golden requirements is very simple to grok, yet so few do it.
Handbook of Educational Data Mining - Nov 4, 2010.
Covers novel EDM methods, including those that link psychometrics with EDM; Presents detailed case studies that show how the methods are applied using real educational data; Discusses the influence of open data repositories.
New book: Computational Intelligence and Pattern Analysis in Biological Informatics - Nov 3, 2010.
this unique volume provides both theoretical and experimental results, and describes basic principles of computational intelligence and pattern analysis while deepening the reader's understanding of the ways in which these principles can be used for analyzing biological data in an efficient manner.
Cognos 10 Launch and My Key Takeaways from IBM IOD - Oct 29, 2010.
We will only have four-to-six vendors and platforms to choose from, as compared to hundreds of options we have today, given the speed at which IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are acquiring software companies

News Briefs

DiscoverText: Easy-to-Use eDiscovery Software - Nov 9, 2010.
enables researchers to login using Facebook credentials to immediately archive, search, and intelligently classify thousands of posts and comments on Facebook.
SMU 2nd in the 2010 SAS Data Mining Shootout - Nov 8, 2010.
The task was to determine the economic benefit of reducing the Body Mass Indices (BMIs) of a selected number of individuals by 10% and to determine the cost savings that would accrue to the Federal Government's Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Researchers launch hunt for endangered data - Nov 8, 2010.
Global effort will catalogue information languishing in drawers and basements.
prudsys IREUS recommendation engine now available in English - Nov 8, 2010.
At www.ireus.net online shop operators can use the leading recommendation technology in real-time as an SaaS version and integrate it quickly and easily into their own online shop thanks to the numerous ready-made interfaces.
Cisco SocialMiner Software - Nov 8, 2010.
a smart software for scaling the public social media's interests. The users of Facebook and Twitter and many other public forums and blogs will be likely to be scrutinized in order to offer the companies the chance to answer proactively to their needs.
Usama Fayyad Joins Adknowledge as Chief Scientist - Nov 7, 2010.
New Advertising Data Solution Will Maximize Advertiser ROI for Search Engine Advertisers as They Expand Marketing Budgets Outside of Search
GrapeCity ActiveAnalysis 2 for OLAP, Data Visualization and BI - Nov 5, 2010.
New version combines Microsoft Excel export with support for Silverlight, Windows Forms and ASP.NET in one component
Via Science Forms to Launch "Big Data" Analytics Startups - Nov 4, 2010.
Via Science aims to operate on the cutting edge of "big data" analytics. The Cambridge, MA-based firm will serve as part holding company for GNS Healthcare and Fina Technologies, and part incubator for hatching new startups.
Twitter tool roots out disguised mass postings - Nov 3, 2010.
Indiana U. researchers collected suspicious tweets by looking for unusual activity, such as sudden bursts of similar messages. After investigating the patterns of tweets generated by and between Twitter accounts they found several ways in which some accounts were being used in potentially deceptive ways.
KXEN introduces predictive analytics first semantic layer - Nov 2, 2010.
KXEN semantic layer is a reusable and easily modifiable analytical record comprised of business relationships or "data domains" and fields. KXEN Modeling Factory (KMF) enables automatic refresh of analytical data sets and models
SAS Bucks the Trade Show Trend - Nov 1, 2010.
the SAS show's explicit mission was to provoke thinking and idea exchange.
Rapid Insight in Top Three in Direct Marketing Association 2010 Analytic Challenge - Oct 28, 2010.
The top three teams were DataLab USA, Alliance Data and Rapid Insight.
Teradata's Analytics Pitch - Come One, Come All - Oct 28, 2010.
New releases and messaging provide more potential customer choices, IDC analyst says
SAP launching analytics appliances - Oct 28, 2010.
SAP plans to release its High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) in November. The HANA machines employ in-memory technology which will boost business intelligence performance.

CFP - Calls for Papers (see also All CFP)

Data Management and Analytics for Semi-Structured Business Processes, due Nov 15
Semantic Web Conference: Inductive and probabilistic approaches track, due Dec 6
Data Mining for Healthcare Management, due Dec 10
Quality issues, measures of interestingness and evaluation of data mining models, due Dec 31
DATA MINING CUP 2011, due Feb 1
KDD-2011: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, due Feb 11
Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2011), due Mar 1
Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery , due Mar 11

Quote

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Benjamin Franklin