KDnuggets™ News 12:n30, Dec 28

Poll Results: Gun Ownership vs Gun Deaths Connection ( comments) - Dec 27, 2012.
Most data miners believe that there is a connection between gun ownership and gun deaths, and outside the US most believe that the connection is strong.
Most Influential Data Scientists on Twitter and Quora ( comments) - Dec 23, 2012.
Twitter network analysis clusters data scientists and reveals most influential data scientists on Twitter. How does it compare to human ranking of data scientists on Quora?
Top news for Dec 16-22: Gun ownership vs Gun violence connection? Data Scientist traits and characteristics - Dec 23, 2012.
New Poll: Gun ownership vs Gun violence connection? KDnuggets Exclusive: Talent Analytics on Data Scientist traits and characteristics; Big Data in Motion
Top jobs: Data Scientist - New Grad at Twitter; PhD Position/Research Assistant in Machine Learning at U. Konstanz, Germany;

Lavastorm: New Technologies for Self-Service BI and Analytics - Dec 27, 2012.
Download a new research report to learn how to empower business users for self-service insights; technical approaches for both casual and power users, and benchmarks on BI and self-service BI adoption.

Salford Webinar, on-demand: Advances in Gradient Boosting the Power of Post Processing - Dec 24, 2012.
Learn about latest advances in Gradient Boosting and Tree Ensembles, which is good for classification and regression problems and resistant to overtraining, and ISLE compression which is able to reduce the model significantly while improving accuracy.
Top Data Trends of 2013 Webcast, on-demand ( comments) - Dec 21, 2012.
Listen to experts from SAP, IBM, and KDnuggets discussing the Big Data Trends for 2013 and learn what is Hadump and Stacker.
Statsoft Webinar: Save Your Customers with Churn Analysis - Dec 21, 2012.
Churn Analysis builds models of customer attrition and identifies which customers may be impacted. This webinar will give an overview and practical advice for Churn Analysis.

KDD-2013 Call for Papers - Dec 20, 2012.
KDD-2013, 19th ACM SIGKDD Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference, is the premier conference on data mining and data science. KDD is a dual track conference hosting both a research track and an industrial/government track. Abstracts due Feb 15.

Data Scientist at SAS, San Diego, CA - Dec 22, 2012.
As a member of Financial Services Modeling team, analyze customer data and build high-end analytical models for key business problems like credit card fraud, credit risk, network security, tax fraud detection, and revenue and collections optimization.
Modeling Scientist/Engineer at Quantcast, San Francisco, CA - Dec 21, 2012.
Creatively tackle Quantcast most complex quantitative modeling problems and advance the company core statistical inference and algorithmic technology for audience targeting. Our Scientific advisors include top Stanford professors Jerome Friedman and Trevor Hastie.
Senior Analyst, Decision Analytics - Healthcare Vertical at EXL Service, Jersey City, NJ or New York, NY or Hartford, CT - Dec 20, 2012.
A Senior Analyst focus is on end service delivery of analysis and guiding junior staff. EXL Decision Analytics group helps companies tease meaning out of their data to optimize business processes
Engagement Manager, Decision Analytics - Healthcare Vertical at EXL Service (Decision Analytics Group), Jersey City, NJ or New York, NY or Hartford, CT - Dec 20, 2012.
EXL Decision Analytics group helps companies tease meaning out of their data to optimize business processes. We are a rapidly growing company that offers exciting career opportunities in the area of analytics

Research Assistant at National U. of Singapore and Nanyang Technological U., Singapore - Dec 25, 2012.
Application of extreme learning machines (ELM) to sentic computing in order to develop a two-level affective common sense reasoning framework, which will be exploited for tasks such as opinion mining and sentiment analysis.
PhD Position/Research Assistant in Machine Learning at Uni-Konstanz, Germany - Dec 20, 2012.
Conduct research in the fields of machine learning and data mining related to Social Network Analysis. Candidates must hold a Diploma / Master degree in computer science, statistics or a related area.

Kaggle Startup Program offers free competitions - Dec 22, 2012.
Data-driven startups with fewer than 30 employees can submit competition proposals describing their data problem and a sample of their data.
CrowdAnalytix Ideation Challenge: Cracking the Code of Online Consumer - Dec 22, 2012.
This contest is for e-commerce lovers and here feature engineering will be a key focus. Your familiarity or experience with the retail industry will come in handy. This contest runs until Jan 18, 2013.

Big Data: Word Of The Year ( comments) - Dec 24, 2012.
Here is an argument why Big Data should be word of the year.
Top KDnuggets tweets, Dec 24-26: Why is Deep Learning finally succeeding; What does randomness look like? - Dec 27, 2012.
Why is Deep Learning (Deep Neural Networks) finally succeeding in difficult AI tasks?; What does randomness look like? Including V-1 bombs, glow-worms, Dilbert, and Poisson; Where to find time-series data? Quandl is a collaboratively curated portal; Data mining to help reduce traffic congestion: Cellphone, GPS data suggest new strategy
Top KDnuggets tweets, Dec 20-23: 6 reasons you hired the wrong data scientist; Are the Data Scientists Future CEOs? - Dec 24, 2012.
6 reasons you hired the wrong data scientist - #6 he/she does not challenge you; Are the Data Scientists Future CEOs? ; Dice lists top skills desired for data analytics pros: Hadoop, MongoDB, Django, but no SAS, R, python? Most influential Data Scientists on Twitter
Top KDnuggets tweets, Dec 17-19: Gun Deaths vs Gun Ownership graph; A programmer's guide to big data: 12 tools - Dec 20, 2012.
Gun Deaths vs Gun Ownership graph: the price US pays for its love of guns; A programmer's guide to big data: 12 tools to know; Who are the most notable and influential data scientists? Intel-recommended Book: "Statistical and Machine-Learning Data Mining"

One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.

A.A. Milne