KDnuggets™ News 12:n08, Apr 4

Features

• Sceptical of Machine Learning replacing Domain Expertise - Apr 3, 2012.
  The majority of KDnuggets readers think that there are many domains where machine learning cannot beat domain expertise. But for how long?
• Data Science Top Online Influencers - Mar 28, 2012.
  The current leaders are Alex Popescu (myNOSQL), James Kobielus (Forrester Research), Gregory Piatetsky (KDnuggets), and Jeff Kelly (SiliconANGLE).
• DM Radio, Apr 5: Acres of Diamonds - Mining Enterprise Data with an Open Mind - Mar 30, 2012.
  Hosts Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson interview a who's who of the data mining world, including: Dean Abbott of Abbott Analytics, Eric Seigel of Prediction Impact; Steve Hilton of Alpine Data Labs; and Gregory Piatetsky of KD Nuggets.
• Top 10 in Data Mining - Mar 27, 2012.
  We look at top 10 keywords, authors, publications, organizations, and more. Which keywords have grown the most in the last 5 years?
• Predictive Analytics World, June 25-26, Chicago - Mar 28, 2012.
  The latest techniques and methods - join your peers in Chicago for Predictive Analytics World, the business event covering today's commercial deployment of predictive analytics across industries and across software vendors.
• Top news, jobs in March - Apr 2, 2012.
  Target was not wrong to use analytics to find pregnant women; Berkeley course on Data Science; Top 10 in Data Mining
  Top jobs: Data Scientist at Facebook; Summer Internship at Akamai
• Additions to KDnuggets in March - Apr 1, 2012.
  New companies, datasets, education, meetings, software, solutions, websites
• Top news for Mar 25-31 - Apr 1, 2012.
  Top 10 in Data Mining; Berkeley course on Data Science; Google summer of code and R; Data Science top influencers
  Top jobs: Data Scientist, Trulia; Senior Analyst, FinCEN
• Top KDnuggets Analytics, Data mining, and Big Data tweets, Mar 29-31 - Mar 31, 2012.
  Social network analysis with R, 25% of discovery, neutrinos and SwissRailPass, US Gov panel on Big Data, 10 Analytics Job Trends, and more.
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Mar 26-28 - Mar 28, 2012.
  Data mining in one picture, Top 10 in Data Mining, Walmart Big Data Tools, Best explanation of "faster than light neutrinos" and more.
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Mar 19-25: 1st course in Data Science, SAP drops SPSS, Google Big Query - Mar 26, 2012.
  First (?) course in Data Science, SAP dropping SPSS, Google Big Query, SXSW, Twitter and McDonalds, guessing the vote in presidential elections, and more.
• Top news for Mar 18-24 - Mar 25, 2012.
  New Poll: Can Machine Learning on Big Data replace Domain Expertise?; Berkeley Data Science course, resources; Caltech ML course
  Top jobs: Data Scientist at Facebook; Director of Analytics at Altius U.

Courses, Events

• NEW 2-Day Course on Oracle Data Mining - Mar 28, 2012.
  This new course was developed for customers and anyone wanting to learn more about data mining, predictive analytics and knowledge discovery inside the Oracle Database.
• Students needed: Google summer of code 2012 and R - Mar 27, 2012.
  If you are a student looking to write some code for the R community, Google is willing to pay you $5000 for 3 months during this summer of 2012.
• Syracuse new graduate certificate in data science - Mar 25, 2012.
  This is the first New York State approved certificate of advanced study in Data Science. This is a graduate program that can be taken independently or as part of a masters degree, taken fully online, fully on campus or mixed, and can be completed part time or full time.
• Berkeley course on Data Science, Spring 2012 - Mar 24, 2012.
  The first (?) course on data science taught at UC Berkeley. Slides, video, and other resources are available online to would-be data scientists.

Webcasts

• Wharton Research Opportunity: If you "LIKE" will you Buy? - Apr 2, 2012.
  Comprehensive data from a major consumer goods company is available for research. The company encourages research on the role of social media communication in brand purchases that will help drive their social media strategy. Tune in to May 4 webcast to learn more.

Software

• First Look - Rapid Insight Analytics - Mar 30, 2012.
  Rapid Insight is expanding into fund raising and other areas. Its tools include Rapid Insight Analytics - a data mining workbench, and Veera - a data preparation tool. Note: Rapid Insight should not be confused with Rapid-I, developers of RapidMiner.
• First Look - Rapid-I, RapidMiner - Mar 29, 2012.
  RapidAnalytics suite consists of RapidMiner predictive analytics and RapidReporting (BI reports and dashboard). Built on top of these are some solutions including RapidLab for configuration, RapidNet for network analysis and RapidSentilyzer to analyze web text for sentiment.
• Comparison of Hadoop Frameworks - Mar 26, 2012.
  Open Source expert compares 6 Hadoop Frameworks: Hive, Pig, Scalding, Scoobi, Scrunch and Spark.
• SAS Visual Analytics - Mar 23, 2012.
  A new in-memory business intelligence (BI) solution from SAS uses a highly visual interface to bring powerful analytics to a broader class of users than ever before.

Jobs

• San Diego: Analytics Careers are Here! - Apr 2, 2012.
  Over 6,000 technology jobs are available in San Diego which has been ranked by Forbes as #9 in the U.S. in The Best cities for Technology Jobs and CAREERS!
• Sr. Quantitative Analyst at Citizens Financial Group, Boston, MA - Mar 30, 2012.
  Responsible for development, maintenance, and back testing of Operational Risk quantification framework complaint to Basel, stress testing and capital adequacy regulatory requirements.
• Quantitative Analyst II at Citizens Financial Group, Boston, MA - Mar 30, 2012.
  Provide technical and strategic support for the development, analysis, validation, implementation, and maintenance of operational risk models and quantitative operational risk management approaches.
• Data Scientist, Trulia Data Science Lab at Trulia, Bay Area - San Francisco (SOMA), CA - Mar 29, 2012.
  Work with massive datasets - trillions of user actions and millions of homes. Work on (and help build) a team that loves AI technologies, and can't get enough of data visualizations.
• Senior Analyst (Systems and Methods) at US Treasury, FinCEN, Vienna, VA - Mar 28, 2012.
  Become part of the team that safeguards the financial system from the abuses, detects and prevents terrorist financing, money laundering, and other financial crime. Open to all US citizens. Closing date: Apr 8.
• Landscape Ecologist, Postdoc/Soil Scientist at World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Nairobi, Kenya - Mar 27, 2012.
  2 positions, requiring statistical analysis skills in multivariate and spatio-temporal analysis of ecological data, and experience in database management and multivariate statistical analysis methods.
• Data Analysis Consultant at Megaputer Intelligence, Bloomington, IN - Mar 24, 2012.
  Create data analysis and reporting solutions for Megaputer customers with the help of PolyAnalyst(tm) platform: experimental, proof-of-concept, implementation, and production projects. Develop successful long-term relationships with customers.
• Director of Customer Analytics at Western Union Ventures, San Francisco, CA (the China Basin District) - Mar 23, 2012.
  Develop, drive, and execute on key initiatives related to emerging Western Union digital products. Consult with the global business units to understand key business challenges and opportunities, set key analytic direction, strategies and tactical plans.

Academic/Research positions

• KTP Associate - Repknight Ltd and University of Ulster, Sentiment Mining at U. of Ulster, UK - Apr 3, 2012.
  an exciting opportunity for a high-calibre graduate to work as a KTP Associate to develop unique sentiment-mining technology, utilising cloud-based parallel processing resources. Closing date: Apr 13.
• Lecturer in Statistics at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand - Mar 30, 2012.
  Preference will be given to candidates with expertise in applied statistics and statistical computing with research applications in business and/or industry. Closing date Apr 13.
• Research Scientist - Language Processing, Text Mining at Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information (DIPF), Frankfurt am Main, Germany - Mar 29, 2012.
  Automatic improvement of scientific publications, for which methods from text mining, knowledge extraction from unstructured text, and automatic language processing will be researched.
• Post-Doc Faculty Position in Information Retrieval & Machine Learning at DAI-Laboratory of the TU Berlin, Germany - Mar 22, 2012.
  Application-oriented research at the interface of university and industry in information retrieval, machine learning, semantic web and ontologies, personalization, recommendation systems, and natural language processing.

Competitions

• The price is right for the 13th DATA MINING CUP - Apr 3, 2012.
  The 13th Data Mining Cup is focused on students and started with two tasks: develop a model to predict the product sales, and implement an agent that does pricing for an online shop. Results due May 15.
• Proposals: Innovative Approaches to Measuring Ad Effectiveness - Apr 2, 2012.
  Wharton is looking for leading-edge research projects to develop state-of-the-art methods and insights for measuring ad effectiveness. About 8-15 teams are expected to receive grants of $2,000-$10,000. Submission deadline is Apr 23.
• Data Science London Hackathon, Apr 28-29, 2012 - Mar 22, 2012.
  Are you a smart data scientist? Participate in 24 hours of non-stop, fun data science competition in London.

Meetings

• Key Update for the Text Analytics Industry - Apr 3, 2012.
  Text Analytics Summit in Boston, June 12-13: Listen to top analytics experts from major companies like American Express, Fidelity Investments, Disney, eBay, and EMC on key topics including big data, real-time text analysis, Voice of the Customer analytics, sentiment analysis, and social media analytics.
• Salford Analytics and Data Mining Conference, San Diego, May 24-25 - Apr 1, 2012.
  The 2012 SADM Conference brings together researchers, practitioners, and data mining enthusiasts to learn about data mining technology from practical and theoretical experts. Exchange ideas and experiences focused on the practice of both data mining and real-world analysis of complex data. KDnuggets Discount

Publications

• Framing the Data Mining Problem, Part 1 - Apr 3, 2012.
  In the data mining process, where do data scientists add the most value? Is it in exploring the data, uncovering anomalies and seeing relationships between elements?
• Big Data Talent War: 10 Analytics Job Trends - Mar 29, 2012.
  A gap is emerging among data-savvy professionals, with big-data-analysis and predictive skills trumping routine business-intelligence and information-management talents.
• Big Data's Open Source Momentum - Mar 26, 2012.
  Big Data is an ecosystem in which the open-source approaches have the greatest momentum: the most widespread adoption and the most feverish innovation. Open-source platforms are expanding their footprint in advanced analytics.

News Briefs

• InsightsOne: another big data startup from Yahoo - Apr 2, 2012.
  InsightsOne was founded by the team that built Yahoo!'s consumer data and analytics platform. The mission is to provide cloud-based predictive analytic services to any company.
• Obama Administration Big Data Initiative - Mar 30, 2012.
  NSF, NIH, DoD, DoE, DARPA and USGS announced more than $200 million in new commitments that promise to greatly improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data.
• Opera buys Commendo to create predictive analytics powerhouse - Mar 29, 2012.
  This acquisiton puts members of the top two teams in Netflix prize under the same roof and gives Opera a new recommendation engine to serve its clients engaged in e-commerce.
• Will Google Big Query Transform Big Data Analysis? - Mar 24, 2012.
  Google Big Query, currently in beta, will offer an array of SQL and GUI-driven SQL analyses of tens of terabytes of data. Google advertisers likely to be first clients, but how will others load the data?

CFP - Calls for Papers

• ICDM-12-w: IEEE ICDM 2012 Call for Workshop Proposals, due Apr 6
• TIR'12: Text-Based Information Retrieval, due Apr 6
• DMIN'12: The 2012 International Conference on Data Mining (DMIN'12), due Apr 12
• PAW Boston 2012: Predictive Analytics World (Bos), due Apr 13
• ICTQBI: ICT Quality and Business Intelligence, due Apr 13
• PGM2012: Probabilistic Graphical Models, due Apr 27
• PersDB 2012 : Personalized Access, Profile Management, and Context Awareness in Databases , due May 7
• AdML: ICML-2012 Online Advertising Workshop, due May 7
• SensorKDD-2012: Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data, due May 8
• CDKD 2012: Cross Domain Knowledge Discovery in Web and Social Network Mining, due May 12
• SOFTMINE12: Software Mining, due May 14
• CIKM 2012: Conf. on Information and Knowledge Management, due May 18
• JIMSE: Joint workshop on Intelligent Methods for Software System Engineering, due May 20

Quote

My tweet of Sheldon Glashow explanation of faster than light neutrinos was retweeted by SwissRailPass

However, neutrinos could not have taken the Swiss Rail. Why? The could not charge the tickets.