D S * CONFERENCES & SEMINARS 05.12.98

May 19, New York
May 20, Boston
June 1, Hartford
June 3, Atlanta

DATA MINING - EXTENDING THE VALUE OF YOUR ENTERPRISE DATA: A MAGNIFY-SPONSORED SERIES OF DATA MINING SEMINARS, FEATURING TOP ANALYSTS AS SPEAKERS
Contact: 888-336-4768
jkt@magnify.com
steve.friedberg@demgroup.com

Description: Analysts such as Meta Group;s Aaron Zornes, International Data Corporation's Henry Morris, Data Miners' Michael J.A. Berry and APower Solutions'Alan Parker will address the seminars. Seminar attendance is free. This executive-level, business-focused series will outline what companies need to know as they consider implementing data mining in their enterprises. Magnify's president, Robert Grossman, will also speak at the seminars. Grossman and the analysts will be available for interviews following their speeches.
Key topics include:

• How data mining works Executive overview of the data mining process
• Who benefits from data mining in your organization
• State of the current data mining market Success stories, misconceptions, myths
• Generating a return on investment Driving the benefits of data mining down to front-line operations
• The future of data mining Standards and portability

May 11-12, Dallas
14-15, Washington

SECOND GENERATION DATA WAREHOUSING / PRACTICAL DATA MINING SEMINAR TOUR
Contact: http://www.kivaproductions/seminars.com
1-800-989-8899
Description: Led by Bill Inmon, Michael J.A. Berry, and Gordon S. Linoff, this 2-day seminar is for managers, designers, developers, and data warehouse & mining professionals. Lectures by seminar leaders will be followed by discussions, with ample opportunity for questions and audience interaction.

May 13-14

DATA MINING: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE
Location: Herndon, Virginia
Contact: http://www.gordianknot.com
800-405-2114
agent@gordianknot.com

Those in attendance of this Gordian Institute short course will learn about different methods of modeling and how those models apply to real business problems. Those who desire to make data mining an integral part of their business process are target candidates. Attendees will learn to:

• Uncover valuable information buried in data.
• Learn what data has real meaning and what data simply takes up space (also known as "data prospecting")
• Examine which data mining methods and tools are most effective
• Avoid pitfalls in the analysis of results Gordian's "Data Mining: Principles and Practice" seminar focuses on actual use and implementation of data mining techniques in the real world. The instructor has been deeply involved with the development of data mining methods and the means of their use. Actual products will be reviewed, as will results drawn from real data mining applications.

Those who would like a hands-on perspective to the instructional sessions may attend an optional third day application workshop. The workshop will highlight superior performance as well as pitfalls resulting from various tools and techniques when applied to different types of data intensive problems. Objective evaluations of popular data mining products can save immeasurable time and effort in assessing and selecting which suite of tools will perform best for your application.

May 17-22

DW BEST PRACTICES
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Contact: http://www.dw-institute.com/events1.htm
301-947-3730

June 8-9

DCI'S MANAGING DATA WAREHOUSE PROJECTS SEMINAR
Location: Toronto, Canada
Contact: http://www.dci.com
978-470-3880

June 10-12

DCI'S DATA ANALYSIS AND MODELING FOR BUILDING THE DATA WAREHOUSE SEMINAR Location: Toronto, Canada
Contact: http://www.dci.com
978-470-3880

June 22-23

DCI'S DEVELOPING THE BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESSFUL DATA WAREHOUSES AND DATAMARTS SEMINAR
Location: Dallas, Texas
Contact: http://www.dci.com
978-470-3880

June 23-25

DCI'S DATABASE AND CLIENT/SERVER WORLD
Location: Boston, Mass.
Contact: http://www.dci.com/database

June 24-26, Dallas

DCI'S BUILDING DATA WAREHOUSES AND DATA MARTS TO DELIVER MEASURABLE BUSINESS BENEFITS SEMINAR
Contact: http://www.dci.com
978-470-3880

June 25-26

JAVA DATABASE SUMMIT
Location: Washington, D.C.
Contact: http://www.dbsummit.com

July 8-9

NT ENTERPRISE SUMMIT '98
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Contact: http://www.devx.com/home/conferences/conferences.asp

Aug. 31

WORKSHOP: KEYS TO THE COMMERCIAL SUCCESS OF DATA MINING
Location: New York, NY
Contact: kdd-workshop@exapps.com
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/KDD/1998/

• Call For Participation *

To be held in conjunction with The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining New York City, August 31, 1998

Chairs:

     Kurt Thearling
     Director of Advanced Analytics
     Exchange Applications
     695 Atlantic Avenue
     Boston, MA 02111

     Roger M. Stein
     Vice President, Senior Credit Officer
     Quantitative Analytics and Knowledge Based Systems
     Moody's Investors Service
     99 Church Street
     New York, NY 10007

Description: Data mining is on the cusp of true commercial success. Commercial institutions are starting to move beyond pilot studies and research programs toward the production use of predictive models for real world business applications. While this is exciting, it is also where it gets harder.

Successful data mining in business doesn't come down to simply having a hot algorithm and giving it to an experienced modeler. Business users care about things such as database support, application integration, business templates, flexibility, scalability, real profitability, and other issues that have not historically been the concern of the KDD community. From a development point of view, the core algorithms are now a small part, perhaps 10%, of the overall data mining application, which itself is only 10% of the business process that contains the application. The purpose of this workshop is to focus on the remaining 99% so that commercial data mining application are relevant to business users.

A number of the issues that we hope will get addressed at the workshop are described in a recent article by Kurt Thearling titled "Some Thoughts on the Current State of Data Mining Software Applications" (available online at http://www.santafe.edu/~kurt/text/dsstar/top10.shtml ) and in an interview given by Roger Stein (also available online at http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~rstein/interview.html ).

Objectives: The goal is to bring together a diverse group of developers, users, and integrators of business data mining applications. The workshop will consist of a number of in-depth case studies and analyses, several invited speakers, and panel sessions. Time will also be set aside for discussions.

It is expected that the workshop will include forty to fifty participants.

Approximately half of the participants will come from the data mining development community with the other half coming from the data mining business user community. Developers of commercial software for data mining will also be eligible to attend the workshop if they have significant contributions to make beyond promotional pitches. The set of business users attending will be selected from a diverse set of industries such as banking, retail, insurance, government, internet services, telecom, etc. In addition to developers and users, a small number of participants will come from system integration and services companies.

Position Paper Submission: All participants must submit a position statement of at least 1000-words (about two pages) describing their views on the subject of commercial data mining. The focus should be on the practical application of data mining rather than the underlying algorithms.

For business users, position paper topics might include:

• Experiences (positive or negative) regarding the use of data mining software for commercial applications;
• Areas needing improvement in data mining software;
• Issues in problem formulation for business domains;
• The impact of data mining applications on business processes;
• The lifecycle of mining projects in commercial organizations; or
• Potential data mining applications in specific business domains.

For developers, examples of some possible topics include:

• Issues of database integration for data mining;
• Automated model selection;
• Strategies for addressing data problems;
• Integration with other business software applications;
• Issues in the design of business templates; or
• User interface design for business datamining.

The all submissions should be sent to the workshop chairs via email at kdd-workshop@exapps.com

In addition to the position statements, participants need to include the following information in their submission:

1. Developers: Software developers should include the name of their software application, technical specifications, and the names of three representative customers with deployed applications.
2. Users (and SI/Services): End users should include the names of data mining applications that they have worked with, the industry that they are working in, and the general problem space they are applying data mining to.

Participants will be chosen based on position statements and their ability to contribute to the workshop. All position statements will be distributed to each attendee before the workshop. Depending on the content and variety of submissions, a collection of the papers from the workshop may be published either in book form or as a special issue of a relevant journal.

Timetable:

     Jun 15:        Papers due
     Jul 10:        Notification of acceptance/rejection
     Aug 31:        Workshop

Sept. 23-26

PKDD'98 -- 2ND EUROPEAN SYMPOSIUM ON PRINCIPLES OF DATA MINING AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY
Location: Nantes, France
Contact: http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/pkdd98

Description: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) have emerged from a combination of many research areas: databases, statistics, machine learning, automated scientific discovery, inductive logic programming, artificial intelligence, visualization, decision science, and high performance computing.

While each of these areas can contribute in specific ways, KDD focuses on the value that is added by creative combination of the contributing areas. The goal of PKDD'98 is to provide a European-based forum for interaction among all theoreticians and practitioners interested in data mining. Interdisciplinary collaboration is one desired outcome, but the main long-term focus is on theoretical principles for the emerging discipline of KDD, especially on KDD-specific principles that go beyond each contributing area.

Both theoretical and applied submissions are sought. Reviewers will assess the contribution towards the principles of KDD, in addition to the usual requirements of relevance, novelty, clarity and significance. Applied papers should go beyond an individual application, presenting an explicit method that promises a degree of generality within one or more stages of the discovery process, such as preprocessing, mining, visualization, use of prior knowledge, knowledge refinement, and evaluation. Theoretical papers should demonstrate how the proposed theoretical contribution advances the discovery process.