Features

M2005 (www.sas.com/events/dmconf/) valuable for business, academia, education leaders who need to fully exploit power of data

CARY, N.C. (Oct. 3, 2005) - SAS, the leader in business intelligence, will again host M2005, October 24-25, 2005 at the all-suite Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. M2005, the world's largest data mining conference, will feature new sessions, workshops and keynote presentations to deliver even more value to attendees.

Co-chaired by Jerry Oglesby, the Director of Higher Education Consulting at SAS, and Michael Berry, the co-founder and principal of Data Miners, M2005, the 8th annual offering highlights best practices in the fields of predictive analytics, unstructured data, web mining and more. Last year's conference, M2004, attracted more than 700 data mining practitioners and business decision makers from more than 340 business, academic, and government organizations in 21 countries, making it the largest data mining conference in the world. Attendees laud the conference as a venue for introducing not only new theoretical concepts and models but the latest data mining applications and creative techniques. These applications include bioinformatics, financial services, emerging technologies and data mining in education.

"The quality of speakers and the relevance of the topics addressed during these two days is unparalleled," said conference co-chair Jerry Oglesby, "M2005 is unequaled by any conference of its kind in providing attendees a forum for learning and exchanging new ideas."

Featuring four keynote addresses and more than 30 session presentations that reach across industries and business functions, M2005 is valuable for anyone in business, academia, or education who needs to learn how to fully harness and exploit the power of their data. Keynote speakers include: * David Hand, head of the statistics section at Imperial College in London and author of more than 20 data mining books. * David Salsburg author of the internationally acclaimed book The Lady Tasting Tea, and a retired research fellow from Pfizer. * Johannes Gehrke, professor of Computer Science at Cornell and the faculty director of the Cornell Theory Center. * Gregory Smith, vice-president for information technology and chief information officer at the World Wildlife Fund.

M2005 will feature a new Poster Session that showcases submissions from attendees, a pre-conference workshop on Sunday, Oct. 23, as well as two afternoon keynote presentations during the show. Professors Jay Coleman of the University of North Florida and Allen Lynch of Mercer University as well as Mike DuMond from ERS Group will discuss how their newest prediction models have captured the attention of the media by using the power of SAS predictive analytics to pinpoint with remarkable accuracy which NCAA basketball teams will be selected for their annual tournaments, which teams will win their games, and the recruiting of high school football players by colleges.

Immediately following the conference, Oct. 26-28, M2005 will offer additional training courses. Participants will be able to choose from seven courses, including Advanced Predictive Modeling, Mining Textual Data Using SAS Text Miner, and Predictive Modeling Using SAS Enterprise Miner. For more information, visit the M2005 Web site at http://www.sas.com/events/dmconf/index.html, or contact the conference manager at (919) 531-1276.