KDnuggets™ News 11:n07, Mar 16

Features

New Poll: R in your Analytics / Data Mining Work - Mar 15, 2011.
What part of your analytics work in the past 12 months was done in R? Please vote on www.kdnuggets.com
Poll Results: Split on Selling Personal Data for Advertising - Mar 15, 2011.
Poll results indicate a split, with 48% saying no, and 41% saying yes, majority of them wanting a high price in exchange.
Mar 23 Webinar: Predictive Modeling in the Financial Services Industry - Mar 11, 2011.
Learn what are the best practices in developing Predictive Scorecards, in analyzing and validating predictive models, how one company reduced model development time by 400 percent, and more.
Exclusive Text Analytics Podcast and Presentations - Mar 9, 2011.
Ahead of 2011 Text Analytics Summit (May 18-19, Boston), KDnuggets subscribers can get free access to exclusive podcast and presentations on text analytics
Most viewed items for Mar 6-12 - Mar 13, 2011.
Poll Results: Analytics / Data Mining Salaries up in 2011; Big Data mining: Who owns your social network data?;
Top jobs: Decision Scientist, Microsoft Ads Platform at Microsoft, Bellevue, WA; Associate Director, Analytics and Operations at The CementBloc, New York, NY;
Most viewed items for Feb 27 - Mar 5 - Mar 6, 2011.
Poll Results: Analytics / Data Mining Salaries up in 2011; RStudio: integrated development environment for R;
Top jobs: Analytic Solution Architect at HP, Austin, TX; Data Mining Specialist at Apple Inc., Austin, TX;

Software (see also All Software)

Heritage Health Prize Will Include $230,000 in Progress Prizes - Mar 15, 2011.
The progress prizes will be $50K to the top two teams after 6 months, $80K to the top two teams after 12 months, and $100K to the top two teams after 18 months.
Cloudnumbers looking for beta users - Mar 13, 2011.
Cloudnumbers.com, a platform for computationally intensive calculations in the cloud, is looking for beta users to test its R environment.
RKWard - IDE for R-language - Mar 5, 2011.
it provides a convenient user-interface and integration with an office-suite.
Analytics Training India Competition: Propensity Modeling - Mar 4, 2011.
build a propensity model to score leads generated from various online sources present in a CRM system.
Call for Research Proposals: Modeling Mobile Customer Behavior - Mar 4, 2011.
seeking research proposals that will stimulate new thinking and impactful research on "Modeling Mobile Customer Behavior." We anticipate awarding 4-8 grants ranging from $2,000-$10,000 to support high-quality empirical research.
Kaggle Competitions Update - Mar 3, 2011.
2 new competitions launched: identify handwriting and avoid overfitting.

Jobs (see also All Jobs)

Data Mining Analyst at Waterfront International, Toronto, Canada - Mar 15, 2011.
WIL is a financial consulting firm, specializing in developing computer based statistical trading strategies.
Associate Director, Analytics and Operations at The CementBloc, New York, NY - Mar 10, 2011.
designing, developing and delivering analytics-based solutions to pharmaceutical and healthcare clients within this fast growing consumer healthcare, RM and digital agency.
Grapheur Sales Agent at Reactive Search, Work from home - Mar 10, 2011.
Reactive Search is looking for top sales agents to join forces in the distribution of Grapheur (www.grapheur.com)
Data Analyst at Planned Parenthood Federation Of America, New York, NY - Mar 8, 2011.
manage and complete the various processes associated with the major surveys by which PPFA gathers financial, services, client demographics, education and diversity data; direction and management of end-user training and documentation.
Director Of Business Intelligence at Planned Parenthood Federation Of America, New York, NY - Mar 8, 2011.
develop, communicate and execute a vision for business intelligence and data-driven decision making for Planned Parenthood.
Sr. Research Fellow in Soft. Eng. for Pervasively Adaptive Software Systems at Research & Engineering Centre, Wroclaw, Poland - Mar 7, 2011.
work on an exciting project entitled "Computational Intelligence Platform for Evolving and Robust Predictive Systems (INFER)", which focuses on the development of an open, modular software platform for predictive modelling and a next generation of adaptive soft sensors for on-line prediction, monitoring and control in the process industry.
Decision Scientist, Microsoft Ads Platform at Microsoft, Bellevue, WA - Mar 7, 2011.
Looking for a high-caliber individual to help create the most sophisticated analytic solutions for fraud and risk detection.
Manager, Cox Business Campaign Management at Cox Communications, Atlanta, GA - Mar 7, 2011.
part of the team at the center of defining success around B2B marketing execution for Cox Communications. Help to implement the strategy and integrated marketing execution via inbound, outbound sales, channel partners. This is a critical area for the company where we need breakthrough thinking against strong competitors.

Meetings (see also All Meetings)

Mar 22: The Simplicity of Complexity (Bentley U. Talk and Webinar) - Mar 15, 2011.
Complexity Science is a field of research that supports two key findings: first, marketers should hire scientists before advertising their products; second, scientists should hire marketers before naming their field of study
Mar 24, SF: Building recommendation systems on web scale - Mar 11, 2011.
Deepak Agarwal from Yahoo will talk about building recommendation systems on web scale, including statistical models and how these models are applied on a real world problem.
Mar 25, Stanford: Analytics - The Next Wave - Mar 8, 2011.
Experts, investors and executives including Sanjay Poonen of SAP and Bill Schlough of the San Francisco Giants will share their insights into how analytics drive business performance in the new economic reality.

Audio/Video

DHS Chief Privacy Officer on Data mining - Mar 11, 2011.
A recent report by the Constitution Project offers federal agencies some help in managing the enormous amounts of data and how to set up data mining tools. Mary Ellen Callahan, DHS chief privacy officer tells how her department deals with these challenges.
UC Santa Cruz Data Mining Lecture (Feb 16), Classification methods - Mar 7, 2011.
Video of Data Mining Lecture by Prof. Ram Akella (UC Santa Cruz) on Classification methods, including k-nearest neighbors, Naive Bayes
U. California Santa Cruz Data Mining Lectures, Feb 2, 9 - Mar 4, 2011.
Videos of lectures on Data Mining by Prof. Ram Akella, U. California Santa Cruz.

Publications

Statistics can help avoid counterfeit goods on eBay - Mar 15, 2011.
over 80% of the small sculptures and drawings indicated by eBay sellers as by Henry Moore were in fact not genuine, while over 90% of the signed prints were genuine.
Time Magazine on Data Mining of Personal Information - Mar 14, 2011.
Each of these pieces of information (and misinformation) about me is sold for about two-fifths of a cent to advertisers, which then deliver me an Internet ad, send me a catalog or mail me a credit-card offer.
Link Prediction by De-anonymization: Winning Social Network Challenge - Mar 12, 2011.
de-anonymization can be used to game machine-learning contests-by simply "looking up" the attributes of de-anonymized users instead of predicting them.
A Million Random Digits: Reviews - Mar 12, 2011.
from one review: Such a terrific reference work! But with so many terrific random digits, it's a shame they didn't sort them, to make it easier to find the one you're looking for.
March/April issue of INFORMS Analytics - Mar 11, 2011.
In this issue you'll enjoy reading the "how-to" stories and "what-not-to-do" stories that Analytics is known for.
Expert Panel: What's Around the Bend for Big Data? - Mar 11, 2011.
Current trends and prediction from leaders in big data innovations, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook Hadoop engineering group, and Revolution Analytics.
New Book: Ensemble Methods in Data Mining - Mar 11, 2011.
They combine multiple models into one usually more accurate than the best of its components and can provide a critical boost to industrial challenges.
Big Data mining: Who owns your social network data? - Mar 9, 2011.
An attractive application of Hadoop and other Big Data technologies is to analyze users' social activities, sometimes without their express knowledge
Rise of the machines: Coaches vs Data Analysts? - Mar 8, 2011.
Tarek Kamil predicts that technologists will one day be just as important to a basketball team's on-court success as coaches are; they will be determining in-game strategy and making sideline calls themselves.
MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference - Mar 7, 2011.
in "Gut vs Data in NBA Decision Making" Panel, R.C Buford said that he shies away from gut decisions because it makes it harder to take a step back and analyze those decisions after the fact. If you get the decision wrong, you don't know why, but maybe more importantly, if you get it correct, you don't know how to duplicate it.
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software - Mar 5, 2011.
e-discovery software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. Programs can extract relevant concepts even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.
Experience of working on the Prodigy Challenge - Mar 4, 2011.
Konstantinos Vougas was at the top of the leader-board for the InnoCentive's first Prodigy Challenge, The Predictive Data Analysis Challenge. The Prodigy is a Solution Test Tool that provides rapid feedback to Solvers and displays the performance of the top ten performing Solvers.
4th Annual Data Miner Survey Summary Report - now available - Mar 3, 2011.
Highlights of the 4th Annual Survey results, links to past years' results, and more information are available free upon request.

News Briefs

Digital Reasoning Secures Patent for Text Discovery - Mar 15, 2011.
Patent #7,882,055 for distributed system of intelligent software agents for discovering the meaning of text
Zementis Announces In-Database Scoring Solution for the EMC Greenplum Database - Mar 15, 2011.
Universal PMML Plug-in to deliver massively parallel execution of predictive analytics based on open standards
IBM big data, analytics bootcamps - Mar 14, 2011.
global skills initiative will feature 1,200 bootcamps in more than 150 cities around the world, for educating clients, business partners and college students how to use IBM business analytics and other software
Predixion Software Launches Partner Network - Mar 14, 2011.
The Predixion Partner Network is focused on implementing self-service predictive analytics solutions utilizing the Microsoft business intelligence platform
Revolution Analytics and IBM Netezza - Mar 14, 2011.
Partnership brings Revolution R to IBM Netezza Data Warehouse Customers
CMU and Singapore Management U. Create the Living Analytics Research Center - Mar 11, 2011.
CMU and Singapore will collaborate on new techniques to acquire data on consumer and social behavior and pioneer new approaches to analyze such data to develop applications and methods that will benefit consumers, businesses and society.
SAS secures technology patent for better fraud detection performance - Mar 11, 2011.
US patent 7,788,195 B1 for "Computer-Implemented Predictive Model Generation Systems and Methods" is related to technology at the heart of SAS® Fraud Management
Salford Systems Data Mines Baseball - Mar 10, 2011.
Interesting patterns were found in 2010 baseball season, such as teams with a home run-centered approach were less likely to win the division titles because of larger rate of strikeouts
PB Business Insight Portrait Miner 6.0 For Predicting Customer Behavior - Mar 10, 2011.
New predictive analytics solution enables users to identify customers most likely to defect, most likely to purchase, and provides insight into customer lifetime value.
CSAA Demonstrates Salford Data Mining At PAW - Mar 8, 2011.
CSAA used predictive modeling to identify factors for pricing models with different distributional assumptions, and for retaining high-profit customers.
Australia Tax Office targets suspect businesses using data mining - Mar 7, 2011.
The Australian Tax Office used data mining to find 46,000 businesses suspected for under-reporting sales or evading tax by deliberately shifting transactions to cash.
Teradata to Acquire Aster Data - Mar 3, 2011.
Teradata will pay $263 million for privately held Aster Data, proving that it's no longer enough to store and access a lot of data quickly, one must also be able to analyze it quickly.
24/7 Customer Customer Service Twitter Analytics App - Mar 3, 2011.
first online predictive customer service app, Wow!px, is on the iPad as part of B2B twitter analytics tool

CFP - Calls for Papers (see also All CFP)

DMIN'11, due Mar 24
IADIS DM 2011, due Mar 28
Web and Databases, due Mar 30
ICDM '11 workshop proposals, due Apr 1
Social Web Mining, due Apr 5
Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization & Recommender Systems , due Apr 10
Health Documentation Text Mining and Information Analysis, due Apr 21
ICDM '11: IEEE Int. Conf. on Data Mining, due Jun 17

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