KDnuggets™ News 12:n15, Jun 27

Features (8) | Software (5) | Courses, Events (2) | Webcasts (2) | Meetings (3) | Jobs (8) | Academic (2) | Competitions (1) | Publications (11) | NewsBriefs (5) | CFP (10) | Quote

Features

• New Poll: Selling your Facebook data to advertisers? - Jun 25, 2012.
  To justify its huge valuation, Facebook needs to monetize the data it has on its users. One idea is for Facebook to become the world's first information market - this is the topic of current poll. Please vote!
• What Not to Do: Examples of Business Analytics Failures - Jun 18, 2012.
  There are many analytics successes, but we rarely hear about failures. Here are some stories and examples of what NOT to do in business analytics.
• Data Science Cartoon - Jun 15, 2012.
  Our data analysis experts can't read your minds. You're going to reach your own decision regarding hiring us ...
• Get Paid for Your Data on Facebook - Jun 13, 2012.
  NYU Professor propose that Facebook create world information market, where Facebook users get paid in exchange for permission to provide selective information to businesses.
• First Annual DataWeek Conference & Festival Sep 22-27 - Jun 25, 2012.
  DataWeek will be San Francisco's largest convergence of the Big Data, Social Data, and Cloud Data industries, with over 200 speakers leading companies.
• Predictive Analytics World Boston, Sep 30 - Oct 4, 2012 - Jun 26, 2012.
  Don't miss case studies from top organizations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Goldman Sachs, HP, and TripAdvisor, and be a part of the leading event featuring over 40 sessions, hands-on workshops, access to top solution providers, and more.
• Top news for Jun 17-23: European big data companies; Predict which blogs someone will like - Jun 24, 2012.
  European Big Data Companies; Can You Predict Which Blogs Someone Will Like?
  Top jobs: VP Applied Research/Analytics, The Hartford; Data Scientist at Collective, NYC.
• Top news for Jun 10-16: Data Science Cartoon; ML-Flex: free machine learning software - Jun 17, 2012.
  Data Science Cartoon; Poll Results: Top Analytics, Data Mining software used; ML-Flex: free machine learning software;
  Top jobs: Postdoc in data mining at IDSIA, Switzerland; Sr Data Analyst at Akamai, Cambridge, MA.

Software

• White Paper: Using Satisfaction Surveys to Achieve a Competitive Advantage - Jun 22, 2012.
  A well-designed satisfaction survey can give you the answer to your most critical question: Are my customers satisfied? Download this white paper and discover 4 examples of how organizations are successfully using satisfaction surveys.
• Time Series Data Library now on DataMarket - Jun 21, 2012.
  The Time Series Data Library, a collection of about 800 time series maintained by Rob J Hyndman, is now at DataMarket which offers much better access options.
• European Big Data Companies - Jun 19, 2012.
  A twitter conversation on European Big Data Companies
• Open source powers Jaspersoft Big Data Index - Jun 15, 2012.
  Interest in open-source tools and infrastructure for big data keeps growing among developers and traditionally proprietary companies.
• Big Data Analytics Startup Datameer Brings Hadoop To The Desktop - Jun 12, 2012.
  New Datameer software: a personal edition, which can run on the desktop, and a workgroup edition, which can run on a single server.

Courses, Events

• DePaul's MS in Predictive Analytics News - Jun 25, 2012.
  DePaul's MS in Predictive Analytics courses develop both analytical skills and business acumen and prepare graduates to be leaders in the field. See the latest presentation on "Challenges and Opportunities in Data Mining: Big Data, Predictive User Modeling, and Personalization".
• TMA Courses in Predictive Analytics [Aug: San Jose; Sep: Wash., DC] - Jun 19, 2012.
  Get up to speed in data mining faster and more effectively than with any other training program available.

Webcasts

• Webinar: Data Mining: Failure to Launch [July 17] - Jun 22, 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.
• August 13 Webcast - Analytically Speaking featuring Bob Stine and Peter Bloomfield - Jun 26, 2012.
  Join us for a series of monthly webcasts where the foremost analytics experts will share insights that come with years of developing best practices and enjoying great success with analytics.

Meetings

• EMC Data Science Summit Report by Angeliki Papagiannopoulou - Jun 20, 2012.
  A report on highlights and insights from EMC Data Science Summit, exclusively for KDnuggets. No more talk about Big Data.
• KDD-2012, Beijing, Aug 12-16 Highlights - Jun 25, 2012.
  The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences. Early reg deadline June 29
• KDD 2012 Summer School - Call for Participation - Jun 22, 2012.
  The summer school will have presentations from leading researchers and will focus on Mining of Complex Data and Large Scale Data Mining.

Jobs

• Director, Analytics at iCrossing, New York, NY - Jun 26, 2012.
  Lead a team of analysts, dashboard developers, and statisticians responsible for the measurement, attribution, and analysis of digital multi-channel advertising campaigns.
• Finance and Metrics Analyst, Digital at BermanBraun, Los Angeles, CA - Jun 22, 2012.
  Analyze and communicate site performance (Metrics, Revenue and Costs) to internal and external partners, and support business decision making.
• Vice President Applied Research/Analytics, Commercial Markets at The Hartford, Hartford, CT - Jun 19, 2012.
  Lead the predictive modeling and applied research function for the Commercial Markets division; provide strategic direction regarding best practices, prioritization, and business insight and model implementation.
• Data Scientist at Collective, New York, NY - Jun 18, 2012.
  Work in a team of high caliber data scientists and software engineers to develop innovative solutions for sophisticated audience and content-based prediction and optimization products.
• Senior Data Analyst at Akamai, Cambridge, MA - Jun 14, 2012.
  As our data guru and go-to person you will use your data grokking, analysis and visualization skills to crunch data and generate insights, by mining terabytes of advertising data.
• Analytics Solutions Architect at Predixion Software, telecommute - Jun 14, 2012.
  We are innovators in machine learning and predictive analytics for big data... Join us to design, model, develop and support enterprise scale predictive analytics software solutions.
• Research Scientist (Computing/Machine Learning) at LIC, Hamilton, New Zealand - Jun 13, 2012.
  You will use your skills in computing and mathematics to explore, analyse and create new technologies for farming systems and agriculture. Applications close June 22.
• Chief Data Scientist at Intent Media, New York, NY - Jun 12, 2012.
  The Intent Media platform processes millions of ad events a day. We use this data to drive optimization engines, manage advertiser budgets, create analytics reports, and forecast behavior.

Academic/Research positions

• Research Fellowships and Postdoctoral Fellowships at U. of Konstanz, Germany - Jun 20, 2012.
  For researchers in areas including data mining, visualization, or visual analytics, up to 8 Research Fellowships and up to 15 Postdoctoral Fellowships. Contact Daniel Keim.
• Postdoc R&D position in Bioinformatics Genome Computing at Politecnico di Milano, Italy - Jun 18, 2012.
  The Genome Computing project focuses on big data analysis and Web technology for genomic data, and use next generation sequencing technology, which opens up to radical innovation in biological and medical research.

Competitions

• Can You Predict Which Blogs Someone Will Like? - Jun 21, 2012.
  GigaOm Data Challenge, sponsored by GigaOm, Kaggle and Splunk: predict which people will "like" which blog posts from across 90k active blogs on WordPress.com. Splunk platform is available for the competitors.

Publications

• Book: "Guide to Intelligent Data Analysis" - Jun 26, 2012.
  This book provides a hands-on instructional approach to many data analysis techniques, and explains how use them to solve real world problems.
• Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars (Part 2) - Jun 23, 2012.
  Netflix data scientists give more insight into broader personalization technology, including some current models, data, and the approaches to innovation and research.
• Nuts and Bolts of Data Mining: The Histogram - Jun 21, 2012.
  Tim Graettinger reviews a real workhorse for data mining and analysis - the histogram, including the most frequent types: "money", "count", and "outlier".
• Big Data: Smart Meters in Germany - Jun 21, 2012.
  80 percent of all households in Germany will be equipped with smart meters by 2020, and that means Big Data. How do companies use it?
• Industry-Wide Study of Analytics Professionals: How Does Your Analytics Team Compare? - Jun 18, 2012.
  This research study will examine factors about what makes analytics professionals tick, and gain insight into how they vary. If you bring a team of 25 or more, then we will send you a custom analysis of your group versus the rest.
• Confessions of a Serial Analyst - A LatentView Short Film - Jun 13, 2012.
  A fun look on analytics from LatentView analytics
• What Facebook Knows and What Its Data Scientists Want To Know - Jun 16, 2012.
  The company data and social scientists are hunting for insights about human behavior. What they find could give Facebook new ways to cash in on our data and remake our view of society.
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jun 21-24: Citation and Peer Review of Data; Big Data Paradigm Shift - Jun 25, 2012.
  Citation and Peer Review of Data; NIST Big Data Workshop: paradigm shift; ata porn? How much data is created every minute; GigaOM challenge: predict which blogs someone will like
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jun 18-20: European Big Data Companies; How Data Became Big - Jun 21, 2012.
  European Big Data Companies; How Data Became Big; In India, Data scientists hired in droves; Moneyball for Basketball:
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jun 14-17: Turing 100th Birthday webcast; Facebook Data Science team - Jun 18, 2012.
  Alan Turing 100th Birthday webcast; Facebook Data Science team; The life of data analyst - with charts; Data Science Cartoon
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Jun 11-13: CalTech Machine Learning Course; New journal on Big Data - Jun 14, 2012.
  CalTech Machine Learning Course; New journal on Big Data; Top 5 Data Science Influencers; BigData Debate and Meetup, London

News Briefs

• Cirro Launches Company to Bring Big Data to the Desktop - Jun 26, 2012.
  Using a revolutionary federated query engine, Cirro enables users to create mash up style analytics with big data and traditional data sources.
• Could Data Science Reduce Resume Overload? - Jun 20, 2012.
  The startup analyzed millions resumes and job descriptions, and used HR recruiters evaluations of the candidates and jobs to develop an algorithm that predicts compatibility and more.
• Real-time Hadoop? Real-time analytics provider HStreaming partners with Cloudera - Jun 18, 2012.
  Good, fast, cheap - can you have all 3? Real-time analytics provider HStreaming partners with Cloudera to brings milliseconds-latency analytics to the Apache Hadoop and Cloudera ecosystem.
• Rhapsody Selects KXEN to Boost Member Engagement - Jun 15, 2012.
  Company selects KXEN InfiniteInsight(tm) to build targeted messages for its more than one million paying subscribers
• With Hadoop, Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence - Jun 14, 2012.
  Is batch-oriented ETL data integration, relational DW, and old-school analytics too slow, rigid, and expensive to keep up in the big-data era ?

CFP - Calls for Papers

• Silver: Learning from Unexpected Results, due Jun 29
• WOSS 2012: Workshop on Online Social Systems, due Jul 1
• CI 2012: Climate Informatics 2012, due Jul 13
• NETTAB 2012: Integrated Bio-Search, due Jul 23
• ACML 2012: Asian Conference on Machine Learning, due Jul 24
• DaMiC 2012 : Data Analytics and Mining in the Cloud, due Jul 31
• UISN: The Use and Impact of Social Networking, due Aug 1
• DMoLD: Linked Data Mining Challenge , due Aug 10
• DaMNet 2012: Data Mining in Networks, due Aug 10
• JURISIN 2012: Juris-informatics, due Sep 17

Quote

Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. Anatomy of Facebook, Lars Backstrom