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KDnuggets™ News 12:n05, Feb 27


 
  
Features (8) | Courses, Events (2) | Webcasts (2) | Software (4) | Jobs (10) | Academic (1) | Competitions (4) | Meetings (3) | Publications (4) | NewsBriefs (4) | CFP (15) | Quote

Features

  • New Poll: Was Target wrong in using analytics to find pregnant women? - Feb 26, 2012.
    New KDnuggets Poll is asking: Was Target wrong in using analytics to identify pregnant women from changes in their buying behavior and market to them proactively?
  • Poll Results: Analytics/Data Mining Salary by Region - Feb 25, 2012.
    This year poll received twice as many votes as in 2011. US, AU/NZ and West Europe lead in salaries, and we see a significant number of self-employed analytics professionals doing very well.
  • Stephen Colbert on Target and Predictive Analytics - Feb 24, 2012.
    The Colbert Report looks at Target and how their predictive analytics can identify woman's pregnancy just from the changes in her buying habits. Are those analytics too much?
  • Predictive Analytics World, Text Analytics World, March 4-10, San Francisco - Feb 27, 2012.
    Advanced pricing ends Mar 2. Delivering 7 days of content, including workshop days. Predictive Analytics World, March 4-10, 2012 in San Francisco, is packed with the top predictive analytics experts, practitioners, authors and business thought leaders.
  • Big Data Gets Star Treatment in Massachusetts - Feb 17, 2012.
    How to satisfy the demand for Big Analytics on Big Data? Different approaches showcase the strength of Big Data Industry in Massachusetts.
  • Help Create The Human Face of Big Data - Feb 21, 2012.
    The Human Face of Big Data project is dispatching one hundred leading photographers around the globe to capture how Big Data is enabling us to address humanity's biggest challenges. Suggestions for assignments accepted until Mar 15.
  • Top news for Feb 19-25 - Feb 26, 2012.
    Day in the Life of Big Data; SkyTree Fast Machine Learning Server; When Analytics are creepy
    Top jobs: Data Mining Scientist at Apple; Market Research Analyst at Nielsen
  • Top news for Feb 12-18 - Feb 19, 2012.
    Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms; Weave OS data viz; Big Data in Mass
    Top jobs: Postdoc Researcher - Data Scientist at NREL; Sr. Database Architect at Knowledge Exchange

Courses, Events

Webcasts

  • Webinar: Data Mining: Failure to Launch [Mar 8, Apr 10] - Feb 26, 2012.
    Learn how to get started with predictive modeling and overcome strategic and tactical limitations that cause data mining projects to fall short of their potential.
  • Webinar, Mar 5: Consuming BIG Data - Feb 22, 2012.
    This 45 minute webinar, presented by ADVIZOR Solutions and EMC Greenplum, will cover the acquisition, indexing, and storage of big data, how end-users can consume it, and will examine 4 categories of BI: Reporting, Analytical, Content, and Continuous.

Software

  • SkyTree Introduces Radically Faster Machine Learning Server - Feb 23, 2012.
    The Skytree Server - a machine learning engine - is up to 10,000 faster on key algorithms like K-Means Clustering and SVM, and can connect to most databases. Both a free and a commercial version are available.
  • Buy Now or Wait for your next Tablet? - Feb 22, 2012.
    Decide.com, called "perhaps the biggest consumer weapon" by the New York Times, collects and mines billions of transactions to help you decide whether to buy now or wait. Decide.com has the answer for your next Tablet.
  • Wolfram Alpha Pro: Data Science for Everyone? - Feb 17, 2012.
    Wolfram|Alpha Pro lets users take raw data (in many formats) and throw it into the system which will automatically do a whole bunch of analysis, and then return a well-organized report about the data.
  • Weave open-source data visualization - Feb 15, 2012.
    Weave is "ridiculously powerful", designed to let organization offer the public an easy-to-use platform for examining information - creating a "Wikipedia of data". Weave was developed by Georges G. Grinstein and his team at UML.

Jobs

Academic/Research positions

Competitions

  • Kaggle to host KDD Cup 2012, focus on Weibo, China's twitter - Feb 26, 2012.
    Competition will use data from Tencent Weibo micro-blogging service and wil focus on predicting who users will follow and the click-through rates of ads given query and user info.
  • Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program - Feb 25, 2012.
    This program gives PhD students access to Yahoo! world-class scientists, big and complex data, and the potential to make a huge impact on the future of the Internet. Applications due Mar 9.
  • Contest: Airport guest sentiment analysis - Feb 17, 2012.
    create a summarization of the opinions, feelings and sentiments expressed in the comments left behind by guests on the website. Submissions due: Feb 26
  • MyHeartMap Challenge - Feb 15, 2012.
    UPenn launched a social, mobile, crowdsourcing contest to locate life-saving defibrillators in Philadelphia, which are often hard to find and access. Monetary prize options. Contest ends Mar 13.

Meetings

Publications

  • The Risks of Using Spreadsheets for Statistical Analysis - Feb 23, 2012.
    Are spreadsheets more hindrance than help in data analysis? Download a free white paper to learn more, including Why over 90% of spreadsheets have errors, the types of spreadsheet errors, their causes and implications, and what is an alternative.
  • SchoonerSQL: A super-set of MySQL for Big Data - Feb 21, 2012.
    Legacy MySQL does not scale well on a single node, which forces granular sharding and results in low utilization of servers. SchoonerSQL made fundamental and extensive improvements to MySQL to exploit multi-core servers, flash memory, and high-performance networking.
  • How Companies Learn Your Secrets - Feb 19, 2012.
    NYtimes examines how companies can predict customer behavior (like how Target finds women are pregnant from changes in their shopping behavior), and also at the psychology of habit forming and how companies use it to influence consumers.
  • Misfortune Teller - Feb 16, 2012.
    A statistics professor says he can predict crime before it occurs. The crime for which an offender was sentenced does is not a good predictor future crime, but there are much better predictors.

News Briefs

  • Knewton Is Building The World's Smartest Tutor - Feb 27, 2012.
    Knewton is building what could become the world's most valuable repository of the ways people learn. "Education is the world's largest data industry", says Knewton's founder.
  • Big Data Market $50 Billion by 2017 - Feb 23, 2012.
    Great report from Wikibon examines the big data market in detail, and projects it to grow 10-fold to $50B worldwide by 2017. HP Vertica is currently the market leader, followed Aster Data, Splunk, and Greenplum.
  • SAS Prepares Hadoop-Powered In-Memory BI Platform - Feb 20, 2012.
    the package will combine the scalability of the Hadoop DFS and the in-memory processing speed of a RAM-intensive server environment, and will offer rapid analytic insight to answer ad-hoc questions.
  • Collective[i] Socialized Business Intelligence Network for Marketing - Feb 18, 2012.
    Collective[i] hosts the industry's first "knowledge network," automating the work associated with analyzing Big Data and socializing knowledge and discussion throughout an enterprise.

CFP - Calls for Papers

Quote

"After Eisenhower, you couldn't win an election without radio. After JFK, you couldn't win an election without television. After Obama, you couldn't win an election without social networking. I predict that in 2012, you won't be able to win an election without big data."

O'Reilly Radar big data columnist Alistair Croll.


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