KDnuggets™ News 11:n15, June 22

Features (4) | Courses, Events (1) | Webcasts (2) | Software (3) | Jobs (12) | Academic (1) | Competitions (1) | Meetings (1) | Publications (5) | NewsBriefs (9) | CFP (8) | Quote

Features

• Poll results: Data types analyzed/mined - Jun 20, 2011.
  The top 3 data types were table data, time series, and itemsets / transactions. The ones that most grew in popularity were location/geo/mobile data, music/audio, and time series.
• SAS A2011 Conference, Oct 24-25, Orlando - KDnuggets Discount - Jun 13, 2011.
  Analytics 2011 is a merger of SAS M2010 Data Mining Conference and F2010 Business Forecasting Conference, bringing you the latest techniques and methodologies in the field of analytics. Special discount for KDnuggets readers.
• Most viewed items for Jun 12-18 - Jun 19, 2011.
  What do Data Miners Need to Learn? Journalistic Data Mining;
  Top jobs: Scientist, Predictive Analytics at Disney Interactive, Palo Alto; Statistician at Chubb Insurance, NJ.
• Most viewed items for Jun 5-11 - Jun 12, 2011.
  Poll Results: Education Level; Data types analyzed/mined in the past 12 months;
  Top jobs: RA for sports/football analytics, Hyderabad/Singapore; Assoc. Predictive Modeler at Allstate

Courses, Events

• Learn What Really Works in Data Mining, Aug 15-19, Minneapolis - Jun 21, 2011.
  Leverage highly valuable and impactful prospective insight from within your existing data through an intensive course series with over 20 years of innovation. Big savings to KDnuggets Subscribers - register by July 1.

Webcasts

• July 13 Webcast: The Analytics Power Lunch for Power Users - Jun 16, 2011.
  Webcast Building Better Models for Predicting Product Quality will explore use of multiple predictive modeling techniques, use of bootstrap and boosting, and more.
• NWU MS in Analytics Online Info Session, Jun 28 - Jun 14, 2011.
  attend the NWU online information session featuring Master of Science in Predictive Analytics, June 28, 2011

Software

• LexisNexis open-sources its Hadoop killer - Jun 17, 2011.
  LexisNexis is releasing a set of open-source, data-processing tools that it says outperforms Hadoop and even handles workloads Hadoop presently can't.
• First Look - 11Ants Analytics - Jun 10, 2011.
  11Ants has taken WEKA machine learning technology and built a commercial product aimed at making these algorithms available to users who are not expert data miners.
• New dataset released: SMS Spam Collection v.1 - Jun 9, 2011.
  a public dataset of 5,574 SMS (text) messages collected for mobile phone spam research, tagged as legitimate or spam.

Jobs

• Sr. Data Miner / Predictive Analyst at Elder Research, Washington, DC - Jun 21, 2011.
  Lead predictive analytics projects with Federal government and private industry clients
• Data Mining Analyst at Elder Research, Washington, DC - Jun 21, 2011.
  for a growing DC office focusing on predictive analytics projects at several Federal government clients.
• Sr. Actuarial Officer at Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Whitehouse Station, NJ - Jun 21, 2011.
  Insurance analytics, including development of predictive models for Homeowners insurance that identify profitable/unprofitable risks and enhance our ability to match rate to risk
• Senior Data Mining Engineer at eBay, San Jose, CA - Jun 20, 2011.
  We build real time machine learning applications processing 100s of millions of transactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data.
• Scientist, Predictive Analytics at Disney Interactive Media Group, Palo Alto, CA - Jun 16, 2011.
  prototype and deploy algorithms and quantitative models to improve monetization and operating efficiency across multiple areas of DIMG's games business. Work with engineers and business owners.
• Manager of Customer & Site Analytics at Sports Authority, Denver, CO - Jun 15, 2011.
  a critical thinker and analytical expert in supporting the eCommerce group, and a primary driver of the eCommerce strategy with respect to promotions, marketing, and operations.
• Group Manager of Advanced Analytics (Loyalty/CRM) at Sports Authority, Denver, CO - Jun 15, 2011.
  Be the lead statistician for the CRM and loyalty initiatives as we build them from the ground up as one of our top strategic priorities for the coming year.
• Advanced Analytics Modeling Resource (Statistics Emphasis) at Dow Chemical, Midland, MI - Jun 15, 2011.
  provide technical expertise to perform a detailed mathematical analysis of various critical Business problems; to build mathematical models for value creating opportunities.
• Advanced Analytics Modeling Resource (Economics Emphasis) at Dow Chemical, Midland, MI - Jun 15, 2011.
  use data mining from a Six Sigma perspective in Opportunity Identification projects; use mathematical modeling to reduce risk, describe uncertainty and understand complexity.
• Statistician at Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Whitehouse Station, NJ - Jun 13, 2011.
  Develop predictive models for personal automobile insurance coverages that identify profitable/unprofitable risks and enhance our ability to match rate to risk, and other insurance-related analysis.
• Data Operations Engineer at WaPo Labs, Washington, DC - Jun 13, 2011.
  Be the foundation of an effective data team; Connect to new data sources to expand our knowledge, tune our data machine running at top speed and experiment with new technologies to make sure we're on top of the constantly changing online world.
• Associate Predictive Modeler-000DRY at Allstate Insurance, Northbrook, IL - Jun 8, 2011.
  work with a team of highly skilled and expert predictive modelers at one of the leading property and casualty insurance companies.

Academic/Research positions

• PhD Studentship: Potential Of Psychological Information To Inform Credit Scoring at U. of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK - Jun 15, 2011.
  a three year PhD studentship on the project entitled "Potential of Psychological Information to inform credit scoring"; use data mining techniques to identify potential psychological characteristics from a range of data sources to supplement existing credit scoring models.

Competitions

• Humanities Digging into Data Challenge - Jun 13, 2011.
  8 digital-humanities research projects showed how creative scholars have gotten in combining big data and digital tools.

Meetings

• Text Analytics Survey, Sentiment Analysis West (Nov 9) - Jun 16, 2011.
  If you work with BI, data, content, or analytics, please participate in a survey being run by Seth Grimes of Alta Plana Corporation, and check out the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, planned for November 9 in San Francisco.

Publications

• FT: A football revolution - Jun 21, 2011.
  FT excellent article on changes in football (soccer) brought by analytics. Football is becoming clever - data on players is starting to drive club decisions, particularly about which players to buy and sell.
• Going Green with Data Mining - Jun 19, 2011.
  for problems like store site location, direct marketing, CRM and traveling salesmen, data mining can have a "green" impact.
• What do Data Miners Need to Learn? - Jun 16, 2011.
  I've been asked by several folks recently what they need to learn to succeed in data mining and predictive analytics.
• Journalistic Data Mining - Jun 15, 2011.
  a brilliant talk by Jonathan Stray of AP on investigating millions of documents by visualizing clusters and using other computational tools.
• INFORMS Analytics Magazine for May/June - Jun 9, 2011.
  Featuring "The Secret to Better Credit Risk Management", "Risk in Revenue Management", "Five Best Practices in Behavioral Segmentation", "Sports Law Analytics" and more.

News Briefs

• To Buy or Not to Buy? Decide Has The Answer - Jun 21, 2011.
  Search for a TV, camera or a laptop and get an immediate buy or wait recommendation, a prediction, with confidence level, on when to buy.
• Partners Accenture, SAS to Develop Analytical Products on 3 Continents - Jun 20, 2011.
  Accenture and SAS will jointly establish innovation centers (in Europe, San Jose, and Mumbai) to develop analytical capabilities and products for a host of markets.
• What Gamers Want: Researchers Develop Tool To Predict Player Behavior - Jun 19, 2011.
  a new method that can accurately predict the behavior of players in online role-playing games with up to 80% accuracy.
• New Open-source Analytics Options - Jun 17, 2011.
  Infobright, Jaspersoft and Ingres announce new open-source analytics, DW offerings. Of particular interest is Rough Query which lets users get results faster from especially large data sets.
• Pitney Bowes Committed to Customer Communications and Analytics - Jun 14, 2011.
  Pitney Bowes wants to position its software, services and hardware to help customers with profiling, preparation, multichannel output, customer response management and analytics.
• SAS leads advanced analytics market - Jun 14, 2011.
  according to IDC Worldwide BI Tools 2010 report, SAS continues to lead the market with 35.2 percent share.
• FEMA watchdog endorses data mining to uncover overpayments - Jun 12, 2011.
  Federal inspectors are calling for FEMA to use data mining for preventing future losses since the agency is now tasked with recovering about $643 million worth of potential overpayments for housing assistance.
• A database of payments to doctors by drug companies - Jun 10, 2011.
  Opens access to payment information compiled from pharmaceutical and medical device industries
• Google Acquires PostRank, An Analytics Service For The Social Web - Jun 9, 2011.
  PostRank helps measure how far content, like tweets and Facebook updates, spread across the web. POstrank team will be relocating to Google headquarters.

CFP - Calls for Papers

• ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2011: Advances in Geographic Information Systems, due Jun 24
• CI 2011: Workshop on Climate Informatics, due Jul 8
• DDDM 2011: Domain Driven Data Mining, due Jul 23
• DiveRS 2011: ACM RecSys Workshop on Novelty and Diversity in Recommender Systems, due Jul 25
• WSDM-2012: 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, due Aug 4
• PADM 2011: 3rd IEEE Intl. Workshop on Privacy Aspects of Data Mining , due Aug 5
• Climate-KD-11: Knowledge Discovery From Climate Data, due Aug 5
• SAC 2012 DS: The 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing DATA STREAMS TRACK, due Aug 31

Quote

On the value of expertise appropriately applied, Professor Sheldon Glashow (Nobel laureate in Physics, 1979) recalls: "My father the plumber once told me that he had repaired a complex heating system with a single well-placed kick of his foot."

from Rubens/Anders Scientific