KDnuggets™ News 12:n03, Feb 8

Features (10) | Courses, Events (5) | Software (4) | Jobs (15) | Academic (2) | Competitions (3) | Meetings (1) | Publications (4) | NewsBriefs (6) | CFP (13) | Quote

Features

• New Poll: Analytics/DM Salary? - Feb 7, 2012.
  New KDnuggets Poll is asking: if you are in Analytics field, what is your Annual Salary/Income? Please vote
• Who are the top influencers in Big Data, Analytics, Data Mining? - Feb 6, 2012.
  KDnuggets was #15 on Forbes List of Top Influencers in Big Data. Who are the others, and who influences Analytics and Data Mining?
• Predictive Analytics World, Text Analytics World, March 4-10, San Francisco - Feb 7, 2012.
  Delivering 7 days of content, including workshop days. Predictive Analytics World, March 4-10, 2012 in San Francisco, is packed with the top predictive analytics experts, practitioners, authors and business thought leaders.
• Online MS in Predictive Analytics at Northwestern - Feb 1, 2012.
  The MSPA online program provides a thorough grounding in advanced analytics and practical application, along with leadership and communication skills. Application Deadline: April 15.
• James Taylor Workshop (Mar 8, SF): Business Friendly Data Mining with Decision Management - Jan 31, 2012.
  This workshop will show you how to improve business/analytics/IT collaboration and understanding; Clarify the data mining goals; Enable rapid deployment of models in IT/operational systems.
• Text analytics report unlocks business critical applications - Jan 25, 2012.
  This newly released text analytics report (free) looks at commercial applications, including multi-lingual tools, to help drive competitive advantage and has insight from four pioneers in data analytics.
• Top news for Jan 29 - Feb 4 - Feb 5, 2012.
  KDDCUP 2012; Microsoft plan for Hadoop and big data; The Koblenz Network Datasets
  Top jobs: Data Scientist at Twitter; Research Scientist at RSA.
• Top news, jobs in January - Feb 1, 2012.
  KDDCUP 2012; 5 Big Data Startups to Watch in 2012;
  Top jobs: 10+ outstanding ML researchers at GE Global Research, San Ramon, CA; ML and DM Research Scientists at ATnT Labs, NJ and CA.
• Additions to KDnuggets Directory in January - Feb 1, 2012.
  New companies, datasets, education, meetings, software, blogs added to KDnuggets Directory
• Top news for Jan 22-28 - Jan 29, 2012.
  KDDCUP 2012; Social Media Analytics at PAW/TAW, SF, Mar 6-7; Microsoft plan for Hadoop and big data
  Top jobs: Data Scientist, Trulia, SF; 10+ ML researchers at GE, San Ramon, CA.

Courses, Events

• SAS debuts new data mining course, March 2012 - Feb 7, 2012.
  SAS and Elder Research bring you a new course: "Data Mining: Principles and Best Practices", which introduces expert techniques and shows how effective application solves business problems. New York: Mar 21-23, Chicago: Apr 2-4.
• A bungee jump into Adaptive Analytics: training for LIONsolver in Europe, US - Feb 4, 2012.
  LIONsolver software combines Learning and Intelligent Optimization for solving business problems. A crucial component is Reactive Search Optimization (RSO). Next courses are in Palo Alto, Frankfurt, and Paris.
• Stevens MS in Business Intelligence and Analytics - Feb 3, 2012.
  MS in BI and Analytics is a 36 credit-degree, designed for part/full-time students who have a BA in a technical field and want to pursue a career in analytics.
• Course: Predictive Analytics for Business, Marketing and Web - Feb 2, 2012.
  this concentrated training program, covers the techniques, tips and pointers you need in order to run a successful predictive analytics and data mining initiative.
• Short course: Statistical Learning and Data Mining III, Mar 15-16, Palo Alto, CA - Jan 26, 2012.
  This two-day course from Stanford Professors Hastie and Robert Tibshirani gives a detailed overview of statistical models for data mining, inference and prediction, emphasizing the tools useful for tackling modern-day data analysis problems.

Software

• The Koblenz Network Collection - Feb 3, 2012.
  KONECT is a project to collect large network datasets to support research in the area of network mining. KONECT has over 100 datasets from sources such as arXiv, Amazon, Digg, DBLP, Enron, Flickr, Twitter, and Youtuve. KONECT also provides code to generate network datasets from the Web.
• Microsoft plan for Hadoop and big data - Jan 28, 2012.
  Hadoop is a central part of Microsoft data strategy. Eventually, Microsoft wants to create a purely open source Hadoop on Windows.
• Big Data Tools: HPCC vs Hadoop - Jan 27, 2012.
  Four key factors that differentiate HPCC from Hadoop: HPCC Enterprise Control Language, Roxie Delivery Engine, Enterprise Ready, and Beyond MapReduce
• James Taylor First Look - Zementis Update - Jan 27, 2012.
  Zementis has a vendor-neutral approach to modeling based on PMML, with four deployment options: ADAPA for RT decision making as a cloud, embedded or server deployment, and Universal in-DB PMML Plug-in. Zementis is also at the forefront of the one of the main debates about PMML.

Jobs

• Sr. Software Design Engineer, Targeting/Prediction at AMAZON.COM, Seattle, WA - Feb 7, 2012.
  We will change the way that the advertising world measures, plans, and buys. Along the way, we're going to face seemingly impossible problems. We're going to argue about how to solve them, and we'll work together to find a solution that is superior to each of the proposals we came in with.
• Multiple Data Science Positions for PhDs, PhD students and a Chief Algorithms Officer at Accretive Health, Chicago, IL - Feb 6, 2012.
  Looking for a Chief Algorithms Officer, PHDs and PHD students from top ranked schools with a passion for machine learning, algorithms, AI, data mining and bioinformatics to solve a massive problem.
• Data Scientist at Resonate, Reston, VA - Feb 4, 2012.
  Performing complex data analysis on large datasets to develop our campaign optimization and targeting algorithms. Do innovative thinking in the fast-paced start-up environment.
• Director, Customer Analytics at Western Union, San Francisco, CA - Feb 3, 2012.
  responsible for consulting with the global marketing teams and other global business units to understand key business challenges and opportunities, set key analytic direction, strategies and tactical plans.
• Manager, Analytics & Reporting at Cablevision Systems Corp., Bethpage, NY, USA - Feb 3, 2012.
  providing thought and directional leadership for enterprise-wide reporting solutions, which deepen the use of Analytics and MicroStrategy tools and broaden the use of new technologies for delivery of Cable and Communications STB reporting application.
• Data Wrangler at Yieldbot, Maynard, MA - Feb 3, 2012.
  Join an analytics team working on some of the hardest problems you'll encounter, on massive data sets, and using bleeding-edge tools to do it, such as Cascalog - a Clojure DSL tied to the Cascading API on Hadoop.
• Senior Application Developer (NLP / Big Data Analytics) at PredictivEdge Analytics, Blue Bell, PA (outside Philadelphia) - Feb 2, 2012.
  Looking for a talented, energetic individual with demonstrated excellence in delivering robust solutions based on leading-edge technologies in the field of social media analytics, natural language processing, cognitive & neuroscience.
• Sr. Software Design Engineer, Recommendations at AMAZON.COM, Seattle, WA - Feb 1, 2012.
  This role is in a small start-up initiative within the Recommendations team, with initial focus on building a next-generation prototype. Requires a willingness to deal with ambigiuity and find out of the box solutions.
• Director, Market Research at Cablevision, Bethpage, NY - Feb 1, 2012.
  responsible for the implementation of new custom primary market research to track customer satisfaction across all facets of the customer's relationship with the diverse Optimum services.
• Manager, Market Research Analytics at Cablevision, Bethpage, NY - Feb 1, 2012.
  responsible for supporting all primary consumer research initiatives and data analytics for the Cable and Communications business including Customer Advisory Panel and proprietary custom research.
• Research Scientist at RSA Laboratories, Cambridge MA - Jan 31, 2012.
  focus on machine learning / data mining for security applications and computer systems security.
• Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning/Text Mining at iCelero, San Jose, CA preferred - Jan 30, 2012.
  top-notch software engineer to lead our distributed machine learning product development. This role is ideal for a software engineer who has both domain experiences in machine learning, text mining and a strong track record in developing code used directly in the end SW products.
• Vice President, Informatics at Verisk Health, Payment Accuracy Division, South Jordan, UT - Jan 25, 2012.
  Verisk Health provides healthcare payers with a suite of claims editing, fraud prevention and clinical validation solutions, including real-time analytics. VP will establish an encompassing analytics vision spanning data warehousing, business intelligence, and predictive analytics competencies.
• Data Scientist, Trulia Data Science Lab at Trulia, San Francisco, CA - Jan 25, 2012.
  Join Trulia's new Data Science Lab! Work with massive datasets - trillions of user actions and millions of homes. Work on (and help build) a team that loves AI and visualizations.
• Financial Modeler at Chase, Garden City, NY (Auto Finance Headquarters) - Jan 24, 2012.
  development of statistical/mathematical models, procedures, and statistical analyses connected to pricing automobile loans and leases.

Academic/Research positions

• PostDoc in Experimental Evaluation at at U. of Melbourne, Australia - Feb 2, 2012.
  excellent statistics and CS, and a healthy dose of "evaluative scepticism", with emphasis on the areas of machine learning, machine translation, and parallel programming.
• Research Interns, Language Processing and Text Mining at Leibniz Institute (DIPF), Frankfurt am Main, Germany - Jan 27, 2012.
  looking for graduate students working on language processing, text mining, machine learning, and data visualization, with substantial theoretical knowledge, excellent problem-solving and programming (Java) skills

Competitions

• DEFT 2012: French text mining challenge and workshop - Feb 5, 2012.
  Le defi DEFT est un atelier d'evaluation francophone en fouille de textes. DEFT is a French text mining challenge workshop.
• PAN 2012 Competitions: Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Wikipedia flaws - Feb 1, 2012.
  3 new competitions: Plagiarism Detection based on the ClueWeb09; Author ID: identifying sexual predators in chat logs; Quality Flaw Prediction in Wikipedia: which articles?
• Develop an automated scoring algorithm for student-written essays. - Jan 27, 2012.
  Hewlett is appealing to data scientists and machine learning specialists to help develop fast, effective and affordable solutions for automated grading of student-written essays. A total of $100K in prizes on Kaggle platform.

Meetings

• KDD-2012 Call for Research/Industry/Gov Papers, due Feb 10 - Jan 30, 2012.
  18th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 12-16, 2012, Beijing, China - the premier conference in the field. Papers due Feb 10.

Publications

• On Big Data Analytics: Interview with Florian Waas, EMC/Greenplum. - Feb 7, 2012.
  With terabytes, things are actually pretty simple - most conventional databases scale to terabytes these days. However, scaling to petabytes is a whole different ball game.
• Analytics Magazine: Focus on Healthcare - Feb 3, 2012.
  The current issue of INFORMS Analytics Magazine (Jan/Feb) focuses on healthcare analytics. Why embrace of analytics is crucial to the paradigm shift from "volume" to "value" and more.
• Social Media Analytics Expert Interviews, part 2 - Feb 1, 2012.
  Interview covers important social media analytics topics from POV of service providers, including insights into their customers, what they currently know, and what they still need to learn about social analytics.
• Big Data is More Than Hadoop - Jan 30, 2012.
  Recent findings from Ventana benchmark research on Big Data are illuminating. Over half the participating organizations process more than 10 terabytes of data.

News Briefs

• Stylitics Is an Analytics Dashboard for Your Closet - Feb 6, 2012.
  Stylitics, launched in private beta in November 2011, is an analytics dashboard that does for your closet what Mint.com does for your finances. See how you can get invites.
• 5 low-profile startups that could change the face of big data - Feb 2, 2012.
  These five startups, either in stealth mode or just out of it, that could help take Hadoop and its ilk to the promised land of easy creation of Big Data apps.
• How CrowdANALYTIX is redefining analytics with crowdsourcing - Jan 31, 2012.
  Indian Startup CrowdANALYTIX has found a unique way to improve algorithms of analytic solutions by leveraging the power of the crowd. For Kaggle, crowdsourcing analytics is a business model. For CrowdAanalytix, crowdsourcing of analytics is a delivery model.
• Text analytics set to become a $1B market place - Jan 30, 2012.
  Text analytics grew 25 per cent last year, creating a $1 Billion market. Text Analytics Summit (London, April 23-24) will focus on how to improve consumer insight to drive competitive advantage. Learn more.
• Clustify 3.0 Adds Integration with a Broad Range of Databases and e-Discovery Tools - Jan 26, 2012.
  featuring the ability to analyze documents stored in virtually any database and export cluster information back into the database as additional columns that can be used by many review platforms and e-discovery tools.
• Amazon Launches Big Data Service - Jan 25, 2012.
  DynamoDB cloud service, based on Amazon's own big data handling experience, offers NoSQL database capabilities and storage built for speed.

CFP - Calls for Papers

• KDD-2012: 18th ACM SIGKDD Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, due Feb 10
• KDD-2012-IG: KDD-2012 Industry/Government Track, due Feb 10
• WOD-2012: Workshop on Open Data , due Feb 29
• SBDM-12: Scalable Big Data Mining, due Mar 1
• ECML PKDD 2012 T: ECML PKDD 2012 Tutorials, due Mar 9
• ECML PKDD 2012 W: ECML PKDD 2012 Workshops, due Mar 9
• KDD-2012-Demos: KDD-2012 Demos and Exhibits, due Apr 6
• ECML PKDD 2012: The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, due Apr 19
• TIR 2012: Workshop on Text-based Information Retrieval, due Apr 26
• SocialCon 2012: Social Computing Conf., due May 11
• IDA 2012: Intelligent Data Analysis, due May 12
• TiiS-12: Interactive Computational Visual Analytics, due May 31
• SocialInfo 2012: Social Informatics Conf., due Jun 15

Quote

With terabytes, things are actually pretty simple. However, scaling to petabytes is a whole different ball game.

Florian Waas, EMC/Greenplum