Growing Need for "Big Data" Analysis Spurs Growth in KDD Conference

More than 1,100 experts who analyze "Big Data" are gathered in San Diego today for the industry's major conference on "Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining" (KDD). The registered attendance is a 22 percent increase over the 900 who attended last year's KDD conference in Washington D.C.

"In this field, at least, we're experiencing a recovery," says Joe Milana, the global head of analytics at Opera Solutions, which was founded as a consulting firm in 2004 and has developed a specialized focus on helping big companies use predictive analytics. When the economy crashed in 2008-09, Milana says a lot of companies eliminated their data analytics services as part of their overall cost-cutting efforts. By 2010, however, he says the analytics industry was experiencing a recovery as financial institutions and corporations realized the growing importance of identifying customer trends and user patterns in the deluge of data that gets generated daily.

... The focus of San Diego's analytics and machine learning community seems to extend beyond search applications, and is focused more on Main Street than Wall Street. Many local companies are focused in various ways on helping big businesses take advantage of the terabytes of data being generated by their customers each month. More than 100 companies in the San Diego area are working on predictive analytics, Milana says, making predictive analytics one of the few cohesive communities in San Diego's fragmented software industry.

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