KDnuggets™ News 13:n23, Sep 24

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Features (8) | Software (3) | Webcasts (2) | Courses, Events (4) | Meetings (3) | Jobs (10) | Academic (3) | Competitions (1) | Publications (3) | Tweets (6) | NewsBriefs (3) | CFP (7) | Quote

Features

• Poll Results: Data Scientists split on whether Big Data reached the Hype Peak ( comments) - Sep 23, 2013.
  The latest KDnuggets Poll showed a split on whether Big Data has reached the Hype Peak, with 47% saying No, and 41% saying Yes. There was a surprisingly big regional difference, with Latin America and Asia (mainly India) most optimistic about Big Data prospects.
• KDnuggets Cartoon: Next Trend after Big Data ( comments) - Sep 18, 2013.
  New KDnuggets cartoon looks at the next trend that will follow Big Data.
• PAW Predictive Analytics World Boston, Sep 29 - Oct 3 - Sep 23, 2013.
  PAW Boston covers all the bases for expert practitioners and newcomers, as the universal, cross-vendor meeting place that brings together the who's who of predictive analytics.
• University of Chicago Graham School Launches MSc in Analytics for working professionals - Sep 19, 2013.
  U. of Chicago Graham School new MSc in Analytics is a part-time program for working professionals, teaching advanced methods in data science and BI and linking analytics with business strategy. Apply by Nov 13 for Winter 2014 start.
• LIONbook Chapter 9: Neural networks, shallow and deep - Sep 19, 2013.
  The LIONbook on machine learning and optimization, written by co-founders of LionSolver software, is provided free for personal and non-profit usage. Chapter 9 looks at Neural networks, shallow and deep.
• DMRadio: Best Practices for Data Mining - Sep 16, 2013.
  Much has changed with Big Data, but the basic principles of data mining remain constant. Join the expert panel of Dean Abbott, Kirk D. Borne, and Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro as they discuss the best practices for data mining, whether data is Big or small.
• Top news for Sep 15-21: KDnuggets Cartoon: Next Trend after Big Data; WekaMOOC: Data Mining with Weka, online course; - Sep 22, 2013.
  KDnuggets Cartoon: Next Trend after Big Data; WekaMOOC: Data Mining with Weka, online course;
  Top jobs: Machine Learning Scientists at Amazon, Bangalore; Faculty (Open Rank), Biomedical Informatics, Big Data Mining at VCU.
• Top news for Sep 8-14: Twitter Data Analytics - free book download; Poll: Has Big Data Reached the Hype Peak? - Sep 15, 2013.
  Book: Twitter Data Analytics - free download; New Poll: Has Big Data Reached the Hype Peak and is due for Decline and Disillusionment?; SAP to buy predictive analytics firm KXEN
  Top jobs: Data Mining Scientist at Apple; Junior Data Scientist at Consorzio Milano Ricerche.

Software

• BigML Machine Learning Made Easy, see it in action - Sep 17, 2013.
  I talked to BigML to learn about their "special sauce" and exciting advanced features such as decision forest ensembles, "Sunburst" visualization for decision trees, BigML PredictServer on AWS, text processing, and Multi-label prediction. See BigML it in action on Sep 25, and get a special KDnuggets discount.
• KnowledgeMiner Insights Data Mining for Mac OS X: Ivakhnenko 100th Anniversary Giveaway - Sep 16, 2013.
  Marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of cybernetics pioneer Prof. Aleksey Ivakhnenko, KnowledgeMiner Software announces a 100% discount on its entry-level Insights Touch Edition, downloadable free only on September 18, 2013.
• DMS Survey: Predictive Analytics in the Cloud 2013 - Sep 14, 2013.
  The survey asks about your experience with predictive analytics, what you think about the main use cases for predictive analytics in the cloud and also about drivers, obstacles, and the role of Big Data. Complete the survey to get the results and be eligible for an Amazon gift card.

Webcasts

• Webinar: Data Mining: Failure to Launch [Oct 10] - Sep 23, 2013.
  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. Next webinar is Oct 10.
• Webinar: Credit Scorecard Development, Sep 26 - Sep 23, 2013.
  Join this webinar to learn how to create automated and scalable credit scoring processes, close-the-loop on risk data, and design and deploy origination and behaviour scorecards.

Courses, Events

• TMA Courses in Data Analytics [Dec: Las Vegas; Mar: Orlando] - Sep 23, 2013.
  Get up to speed in data mining faster and more effectively than with any other training program available. Next courses in Las Vegas and Orlando.
• Machine learning in practice, Industrial course, Oct 28 - Nov 1, The Netherlands - Sep 20, 2013.
  In this intensive 5-day course, you gain a proven methodology to solve your pattern recognition and machine learning challenges. Lectures + hands-on exercises on industrial problems. Bring your own data!
• WekaMOOC: Data Mining with Weka, online course - Sep 16, 2013.
  The course features video lectures by Professor Ian H. Witten, with English & Chinese subtitles, open-source Weka data mining platform, and online assessment leading to a statement of completion.
• Wharton Course: Customer Lifetime Value: Practical Methods and Applications - Sep 13, 2013.
  Customer Lifetime Value is a critical concept for any customer centric organization. This workshop looks at 2 major themes: contractual vs non-contractual settings, and probabilistic approach to modeling customer value.

Meetings

• Analytics 2013 Agenda Available, Oct 21-22, Orlando - Sep 23, 2013.
  The Analytics 2013 conference will gather over 1,000 analytics professionals to learn the latest trends, best practices and research in the field of analytics - agenda now available!
• IE Predictive Analytics and BI Summits, November 14-15, Chicago - Sep 23, 2013.
  Two exclusive meetings are taking place at the Swissotel in Chicago, November 14-15: Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit and Business Intelligence Innovation Summit.
• My report: IE Big Data Innovation Summit, Boston - Day 1 ( comments) - Sep 13, 2013.
  I report on the highlights from the first day of IE Big Data Innovation Summit in Boston, including a brilliant presentation by Stephen Wolfram how Wolfram Alpha makes the knowledge computable, and what he told me about Singularity.

Jobs

• Data Scientist at dunnhumby, Cincinnati, OH - Sep 20, 2013.
  Join our team to help build tools for the next evolution in personalized shopping - be a machine learning/statistics professionals who can take research from the lab into the real world.
• Sr BI Engineer, Amazon Product Ads at Amazon, Seattle, WA - Sep 19, 2013.
  Product Ads is an innovative hybrid of ecommerce product selection with a cost-per-click advertising model. Success for this role is about putting information into the hands of business owners.
• Machine Learning Scientists at Amazon, Bangalore, India - Sep 18, 2013.
  We have ambitious plans for building machine learning platforms and applications and need great machine learning scientists, problem solvers, and leaders who can pull off big long-term strategy.
• Business/Product Analyst at Snap-Interactive, New York, NY - Sep 18, 2013.
  Looking for an analytical savant to take our data and develop strategies that will improve our product, our business and the experience for our 25+ Million Facebook-connected members.
• Data Mining Scientist at Apple, Austin, TX - Sep 13, 2013.
  Apple Data Mining Lab is looking for an outstanding data mining scientist to work with business managers to design, develop, and field data mining solutions that have direct and measurable impact to Apple.
• Senior Modeler at JPMorgan Chase Intelligent Solutions, New York, NY or Wilmington, DE - Sep 12, 2013.
  Designing and implementing processes related to predictive / analytical modeling, data mining, and research on large scale, complex data and planning, leading/collaboration with various internal and vendor teams.
• Data Modeler at JPMorgan Chase Intelligent Solutions, New York, NY or Wilmington, DE - Sep 12, 2013.
  Designing and implementing processes related to predictive / analytical modeling, data mining, and research on large scale, complex data sets, using statistical, machine learning, graph modeling, text mining and other modern techniques.
• Sr. Software Engineer, Natural Language Processing at Knewton, New York, NY - Sep 11, 2013.
  Knewton, an education startup funded by high-profile investors including Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, is looking for a pragmatic, user-data-oriented engineer to work with our data scientists on features that rely on both structured and unstructured data.
• Sr. Software Engineer, Recommendations at Knewton, New York, NY - Sep 11, 2013.
  Knewton is on a mission to personalize education. Join a high caliber team and work in one of the best places in NYC to develop system that offers real-time statistical-based recommendations to hundreds of thousands of students.
• Data Analysis Consultant at Megaputer, Bloomington, IN - Sep 10, 2013.
  An experienced analyst independently developing new and perfecting existing data analysis scenarios and report collections for existing and prospective customers.

Academic/Research positions

• Faculty (Open Rank), Biomedical Informatics, Big Data Mining at VCU, Richmond, VA - Sep 14, 2013.
  VCU is looking for tenure-track positions at all levels, with a special interest in candidates with research focus on biomedical informatics and big data mining who are open to conducting interdisciplinary research.
• Faculty Data Analytics/Predictive Analysis in Public Affairs at University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD - Sep 14, 2013.
  The successful candidate must be well versed in the Certified Analytics Professional domains of practice - business issue identification; analytics problem framing; data, methodology, and model building; implementation; and, model life cycle management - and be able to teach these practices effectively.
• Postdoc in medical text analysis, recommendation systems, data mining at Clemson, Clemson, SC - Sep 17, 2013.
  Projects will focus on the analysis of medical texts, data mining, knowledge discovery, and recommendation systems. Strong implementation skills are required.

Competitions

• IEEE ICDM 2013 Data Mining competition: Expedia - Sep 18, 2013.
  The 2013 contest is focused on utilizing a large hotel search data set to rank search results as a means to increase sales. $25K in prizes will be awarded. Submissions due Nov 4.

Publications

• Web Crawling Social Media for Topic Shift Detection and Expert Spotting - Sep 23, 2013.
  The best asset of an open source software is not price, but the community. This paper is a case study of analyzing community forums for Topic Shift Detection and Expert Spotting.
• Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro on Big Data Education in Big Data Innovation Magazine - Sep 19, 2013.
  I talk to George Hill of Innovation Enterprise about the Big Data skills gap and what companies and universities are doing about it.
• Purple People: conundrum of finding business expertise among Data Scientists ( comments) - Sep 19, 2013.
  Purple is the blend of Red (Business acumen) and Blue (Analytical abilities) and it is a very desired combination for data scientists.

Top Tweets

• Top KDnuggets tweets, Sep 20-22: Statistics vs Data Mining; Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know - Sep 23, 2013.
  Statistics vs Data Mining: Statistics begins after data cleaning is done; Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know; The bursting of the #BigData bubble is imminent, says @mathbabedotorg; A book by Dorian Pyle, Data Preparation for Data Mining, free PDF
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Sep 18-19: Realtime Predictive Analytics w. RabbitMQ, scikit-learn; Peregrine, a fast competitor to Hadoop - Sep 20, 2013.
  Advanced Data Science: Realtime Predictive Analytics Using RabbitMQ & scikit-learn; Peregrine, a competitor to Hadoop, is a FAST Map Reduce framework; IEEE ICDM 2013 Data Mining competition (on Kaggle): Expedia Personalized Sort; Import.io gets relevant data from Web pages to Spreadsheets, makes data extraction easy
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Sep 16-17: Using Twitter Data with R, updated; Skills needed for machine learning jobs - Sep 18, 2013.
  Using Twitter Data with R #rstats, updated for API changes; Skills needed for machine learning jobs; Improving #BigData: Hadoop 2.0 will be faster, better support real-time data ; WekaMOOC: Data Mining with Weka, online course
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Sep 13-15: Twitter Data Analytics, free download; Microsoft looks for Big Data Science projects to host in Azure - Sep 16, 2013.
  Top news, Sep 8-14: Twitter Data Analytics - free book download; Microsoft looks for Big Data Science projects to host in Azure; Markov Models & Predictive Analytics with CATS; Vinod Khosla: Data Science will do more for Medicine than All Biological Science
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Sep 11-12: Big Data University free courses online; "Unstructured" data is NOT really unstructured - Sep 13, 2013.
  IBM Big Data University, offers many free courses online on Hadoop, Analytics; "Unstructured" data like text is NOT really unstructured - it has a very complex structure; Data Scientists: Key "Programmers" in the Convergence of #BigData, Cloud, Streaming and In; Predictive Modeling Misconceptions: Modeler has to be a PhD, Black box model is OK
• Top KDnuggets tweets, Sep 9-10: Build your own Twitter Sentiment Analysis; How Google Applies #BigData To Know You - Sep 11, 2013.
  Very useful: How to build your own Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tool with Datumbox API; How Google Applies #BigData To Know You - very good infographic; Python leads in Open-Source Code Quality, with 5 defects/1 Million lines of code; Yummy! Star Data Scientist @hmason on how to find NYC optimal cheeseburger

News Briefs

• Andy Palmer Best Big Data Startups - Sep 17, 2013.
  Entrepreneur, investor and founding Vertica Systems CEO Andy Palmer shares his thoughts on most-important trends and promising startups in the data space.
• Windows Azure looks for Cloud and Data Science Research Proposals - Sep 14, 2013.
  Microsoft Research asks for proposals from academic/non-profit researchers for the use of Windows Azure, on topics including community data services, streaming data to the cloud, machine learning in the cloud, environmental science, astronomy, genomics, and urban science. Next deadline is Oct 15.
• SAP to buy predictive analytics firm KXEN ( comments) - Sep 11, 2013.
  SAP announced plans to acquire KXEN, a leading provider of predictive analytics technology for line-of-business users and analysts. Who will be the next acquisition target?

CFP - Calls for Papers

• SDM2014 Workshops CFP: The 14TH SIAM Int. Conf. on Data Mining, Call for Workshops, due Sep 27
• ICML 2014 Cycle I: Int. Conf. on Machine Learning, due Oct 4
• EGC 2014 : 14th French-speaking Conf. on Knowledge Extraction and Management , due Oct 7
• SDM2014 Tutorials: The 14TH SIAM Int. Conf. on Data Mining, Call for Tutorial proposals, due Oct 13
• EGC 2014 demos: 14th French-speaking Conf. on Knowledge Extraction and Management, Software Demos, due Nov 25
• BeyondMR14: Algorithms for MapReduce and Beyond 2014, due Dec 7
• DATA 2014: Data Management Technologies and Applications International, due Mar 18

Quote

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Arthur Conan Doyle