KDnuggets™ News 11:n28, Nov 22

Features (8) | Webcasts (1) | Software (3) | Jobs (7) | Academic (1) | Competitions (1) | Publications (5) | NewsBriefs (9) | CFP (7) | Quote

Features

• New Poll: Where did you use Analytics / Data Mining in 2011? - Nov 21, 2011.
  In which industries / fields you applied Analytics / Data Mining in 2011? Please vote.
• Analytics and Data Mining Industry Overview - Nov 21, 2011.
  my keynote talk at San Diego Superdata summit, a survey of where analytics/data mining has been, the current state of the industry, cloud analytics vs ground analytics job skills, and assessment of some big data trends.
• Last Opportunity to register for Predictive Analytics World London, Nov 30 - Dec 1 - Nov 21, 2011.
  Final chance to save with pre-event prices, learn from industry experts, and network with up to 2000 key decision makers.
• DePaul's MS in Predictive Analytics - Nov 21, 2011.
  graduates develop both analytical depth and business acumen through taking courses in analytics, data mining and marketing, learning skills to translate results into terms business clients understand.
• NWU Online MS in Predictive Analytics - Nov 10, 2011.
  provides a thorough grounding in advanced analytics and practical applications, leadership, and communication skills and can be the path to a promising new leadership career.
• Free Web Mining Services for the People - Nov 14, 2011.
  scan any publicly available internet source and extract the data elements of interest into a structured format, at no cost
• Top news for Nov 13-19 - Nov 20, 2011.
  Poll Results: Top Algorithms for Analytics/Data Mining; Free Web Mining Services for the People;
  Top jobs: Data Mining/Research Analyst at Princeton; Phd position in Text Mining for Identifying Radical Innovations at K.U. Leuven, Belgium.
• Top news for Nov 6-12 - Nov 13, 2011.
  Poll Results: Top Algorithms for Analytics/Data Mining; New Analytics Startup from Cloudera Founder; WSDM Yandex Challenge
  Top jobs: Analytical Modeling Scientist at SAS, San Diego; Ruby on Rails Developer (Analytics) at In-Q-Tel, Arlington.

Webcasts

• Data Mining: Failure to Launch [ Free Webinar, Dec 15, Jan 10 ] - Nov 9, 2011.
  learn how to get started with data mining and overcome both strategic and tactical limitations that cause data mining projects to fall short of their potential.

Software

• James Taylor First Look - SAS Enterprise Miner 7.1 - Nov 21, 2011.
  Key elements in SAS EM 7.1 are better time analysis with survival and time series data mining, insurance pricing models for rate making, credit scorecard extensions and full spectrum SAS data mining in Teradata 13.
• KXEN new InfiniteInsight(TM) Express Predictive Analytics - Nov 20, 2011.
  Marketing professionals can build predictive models on-demand with no prior training in data mining techniques
• Google BigQuery Service: Big data analytics at Google speed - Nov 20, 2011.
  developed for large-scale internal data analytics, Google BigQuery Service is now available for all, and is free for now.

Jobs

• Senior Planner Smart Card at TransLink, Burnaby, BC, Canada - Nov 19, 2011.
  provide planning leadership in identifying needs and opportunities for the collection, analysis and insight associated with Smartcard data and the development of related tools and processes. Apply by Nov 25.
• Data Analyst - Analytics at ISO Innovative Analytics (iiA), San Francisco, CA - Nov 18, 2011.
  Critical, front-line unit requires keen, creative visualization of complex data relationships based on detailed business understanding to provide correct transformations and solid analytic structures.
• Data Mining & Research Analyst at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ - Nov 14, 2011.
  prospect identification, data mining, analysis, and presentation for the Office of Development;
• Senior Data Mining Developer at OptiMine, St. Paul, MN - Nov 10, 2011.
  experienced software engineer with a strong background in data mining to help develop our Internet advertising optimization technology. We are still small and you can get in on the ground floor !
• Sales Strategy Analyst at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., White Plains, NY (then Stamford, CT in Dec 2011) - Nov 10, 2011.
  Problem solver who has good technical skills and can clearly communicate findings; A high level of curiosity, motivation, and willingness to continually learn will make the person very successful.
• Analytical Modeling Staff Scientist - #11001656 at SAS Institute, San Diego, CA - Nov 9, 2011.
  analyze customer data and build high-end analytical models for solving high-value business problems, such as credit card fraud, credit risk, network security, tax fraud detection, and revenue and collections optimization.
• Data Mining Analyst at Waterfront International, Toronto, Canada - Nov 9, 2011.
  WIL is a financial consulting firm, specializing in developing computer based statistical trading strategies.

Academic/Research positions

• Phd position in Text Mining for Identifying Radical Innovations at K.U. Leuven, Belgium - Nov 15, 2011.
  generate a better understanding of how "radical innovations" originate and contribute to the performance of companies.

Competitions

• Kaggle: Algorithmic Trading Challenge - Nov 18, 2011.
  Develop new models to accurately predict the market response to large trades.

Publications

• On Big Data: Interview with VP of Engineering at Vertica - Nov 21, 2011.
  Roberto Zicari talks with Shilpa Lawande, VP of Engineering at Vertica, about Analytics Platform for Big Data. In a recent big data test (counting social network triangles) Vertica was 20-40 times faster than Pig and Hadoop.
• Boston Analytics Meetup Presentation - Nov 18, 2011.
  talks on Cloudera, Wikipedia Tag Clouds, Big Data and Hadoop, and MongoDB
• Statistical Learning Part III: Steve Miller interviews Trevor Hastie - Nov 17, 2011.
  Steve Miller reviews The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman and interviews one of the authors.
• Analytics Held Up By People More Than Tech - Nov 15, 2011.
  MIT Sloan and IBM survey points to organizational differences as main factor in competitive advantage with data
• Computational Journalism: a Call to Database Researchers - Nov 14, 2011.
  computational journalism is a rich field worthy of attention from the database (and analytics) community, from both intellectual and social perspectives.

News Briefs

• Microsoft drops Dryad; bets on Hadoop - Nov 18, 2011.
  Microsoft is dropping its Dryad big-data processing work and focusing, instead, on developing a Windows Azure and Windows Server implementation of Hadoop.
• Tech Blogger Starts People Data Mining Company - Nov 17, 2011.
  Kirkpatrick had developed over his years at ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch tools for getting scoops not by talking to sources but by tracking people online.
• Big Data Just Got Smaller: A New Approach to Finding Information - Nov 16, 2011.
  A breakthrough method to graphically represent knowledge enables software developers to easily build intelligent agents such as Apple's Siri and IBM Watson.
• Game Analytics Provider Kontagent Snaps Up $12 Million - Nov 14, 2011.
  a provider of analytics software that tracks user behavior for social app companies, raised $12M is second round.
• ID3 (idcubed.org) Research in data mining, privacy, security - Nov 13, 2011.
  a three-year gift to support ID3 (idcubed.org), MIT/Harvard institute, to do research and development in the areas of data mining, privacy and security for personal data.
• The Supreme Court, big data and 1984 - Nov 13, 2011.
  The case, about whether police needed a search warrant to track a car with GPS for 28 days, can have broad implications for privacy
• Accel Partners announces $100M Big Data Fund - Nov 10, 2011.
  new fund will be invested in companies building out the new infrastructure and companies building applications on top of that infrastructure (spanning BI, collaboration, mobile and vertical apps).
• Starview Enterprise Platform for real-time business analytics and optimization - Nov 9, 2011.
  enables companies to sift, monitor and analyze data and, then, identify the 'best next action' for faster, better-informed decisions.
• FICO Model Central ensures compliance and improves performance - Nov 9, 2011.
  FICO Model Central Solution helps banks, insurance companies, retail and health care companies to maximize the power of their predictive models and meet stricter regulations for model management.

CFP - Calls for Papers

• DSDM'12: PAKDD Doctoral Symposium on Data Mining , due Jan 4
• ACS-2012: Analytics for Cyber-Physical Systems, due Jan 6
• DMHM12: Data Mining for Healthcare Management, due Jan 14
• ICML-2012 w/t: ICML-2012 Workshop / tutorial proposals, due Feb 10
• KDD-2012: 18th ACM SIGKDD Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, due Feb 10
• ICML-2012: The 29th International Conference on Machine Learning, due Feb 24
• INFN-12: Information Fusion, Data Analysis and Mining, and Knowledge Discovery in Hybrid Networks, due Apr 6

Quote

"Once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play that role".
Also can be stated as
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes".
Goodhart's Law, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law