As RapidMiner has once again proved to be the most-used open source data mining tool among the community of data analysts world-wide in a recent poll, it is now the time to give a face to that community. Therefore, Rapid-I hosts the first RapidMiner Community Meeting And Conference (RCOMM 2010) and invites users and developers of RapidMiner to take part and share their RapidMiner experiences with other members of the community. The RCOMM 2010 intends to intensify the community life and strengthen the RapidMiner network by bringing together users and developers of RapidMiner from all backgrounds, may they be scientific or commercial, from the whole variety of applications and from all grades of knowledge. A vital exchange of ideas, application reports, and scientific results will help beginners to advance and will inspire the already advanced leading them to professionalism. Users will profit from in-depth knowledge of developers, who in turn will gain from picking up requirements and ideas for further development.

The RCOMM 2010 encompasses conference talks, in which invited lecturers will discuss aspects of state-of-the-art data mining with RapidMiner. A Call-for-Papers will be issued for those who would like to present their work in that scope. Workshops will be held to give participants a hands-on experience concerning several topics regarding RapidMiner usage. Additionally, attendees of the RCOMM 2010 will also have the option to participate in several courses given by professional RapidMiner consultants in the surrounding of the user meeting.

Visit Conference Home: RCOMM
Registration Link: Registration
Schedule Link: Schedule

[ MSNBC ]

Photo by James Martin/CNET

Future Technologies Group, part of Intel Labs, are researchers who research into technology which humans could use in the future. Recently they did conduct a display of some of the ongoing research, which is more like a open house event. Some interesting next generation projects are as follows:

• Highly accurate facial-recognition system
• Personal energy system
• Interactive Digital Aura
• ClassmateAssist
• Summarize (Text to Speech Software)
• Augmented Image Reality

[More at CNET]

The goal of the process is to catch the patients before they leave the hospital, help them realize the various options with respect to payments, and avoid chasing them later. The billing software companies are helping hospitals by providing information on patients who have enough assets to make payments.

“We know that 30 percent of the population won’t pay because they can’t afford to, and 30 percent will pay, said Stephen Mooney, president of Conifer’s Revenue Cycle Solutions unit in Frisco, Tex. His company aims to identify the remaining 40 percent who have some assets but need help figuring out whether and how they can afford their bill” –  BusinessWeek

Gilbert spend over 13 months to get to the bottom of the issue, and this investigation also  involved data mining knowledge to catch the irregularities. His work uncovered millions in delinquent payments to landowners thanks to a Virginia law that allowed natural gas companies to set up a complicated royalty system that often never meted out money to its rightful owners. It resulted in making changes in this law which are currently being reviewed.

About Pulitzer Prize:
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper journalism, literature and musical composition. Prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of these, each winner receives a certificate and a US$10,000 cash award.

[EditorandPublisher]

SAS Institute, the leader in advanced business intelligence and data analytics software, thinks it can do better. It is introducing a software service on Monday called SAS Social Media Analytics that analysts say seems to represent a step ahead in social media analysis tools.

[Read more New York Times]

A University of Alberta professor is helping to create text analysis tools to deeply examine historical trial accounts from the U.K.’s famous Old Bailey criminal court. While the research project is important to academia, the Edmonton-based researcher said that improving the quality of text mining tools could have benefits for businesses as well.

While academia are developing tools like TAPoR, a textual analysis tool that can summarize a body of text, find collocates, identify important dates, and discover the co-occurrences of two target words, the same could be applied to business records as well. Some of the tools in TAPoR use forms of visualization to help researchers grasp the data even clearer.

[IT Canada]

AISight Features:

• Takes input from current and legacy cameras, recorded video or data files
• Recognizes, remembers and tracks objects frame by frame
• Rapidly learns what is acceptable behavior for any situation
• Identifies and predicts abnormal, suspicious and aggressive behavior
• Provides a wide range of alert systems to a human operator
• Requires no additional operator training
• Requires no changes to the existing infrastructure

About BRS Labs:

BRS Labs is a software development company that has created the industry’s first behavioral analysis system for video surveillance that adaptively learns behavior patterns in complex environments. BRS Labs is the only company that has been able to apply computer-vision and machine-learning capabilities to video analytics, thereby greatly enhancing operator awareness and effectiveness in improving security. No human is required to define parameters for the software to recognize behavior or objects; the software reports unusual or suspicious behaviors based on memories it has acquired through observations over time. BRS Labs was founded in November 2005 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas. The company is funded by $50 million in private equity.

[BRS Labs]

Some highlights:

• 40-item survey of data miners, conducted on-line in early 2009.

• 710 participants from 58 countries.

• Data miners’ most commonly used algorithms are regression, decision trees,
  and cluster analysis.

• Half of data miners say their results are helping to drive strategic
  decisions and operational processes.

• 58% say they are adding to the knowledge base in the field.

• 60% of respondents say the results of their modeling are deployed
  always or most of the time.

• Most data miners feel that the economy will not negatively impact them.

• Almost half of industry data miners rate the analytic capabilities of their
  company as above average or excellent.  But 19% feel their company has
  minimal or no analytic capabilities.

• The top challenges facing data miners are dirty data, explaining data mining
  to others, and difficult access to data.  However, in 2009 fewer data miners
  listed data quality and data access as challenges than in the previous year.

• IBM SPSS Modeler (SPSS Clementine), Statistica, and IBM SPSS Statistics
  (SPSS Statistics) are identified as the “primary tools” used by the most data
  miners.

• Open-source tools Weka and R made substantial movement up data
  miner’s tool rankings this year, and are now used by large numbers of
  both academic and for-profit data miners.

• SAS Enterprise Miner dropped in data miner’s tool rankings this year.

• Users of IBM SPSS Modeler, Statistica, and Rapid Miner are the most
  satisfied with their software.

• Fields & Industries:  Data mining is everywhere.  The most sited areas are
  CRM / Marketing, Academic, Financial Services, & IT / Telecom.  And in the
  for-profit sector, the departments data miners most frequently work in are
  Marketing & Sales and Research & Development.

[RexterAnalytics]