Georg Ruß' PhD Blog — R, clustering, regression, all on spatial data, hence it's:

Mai 21st, 2010

Some remarks regarding my talk

Again, my talk was really good and it felt like everyone was listening. The questions were more or less standard and can be expected when presenting this type of research to this specific IDA audience. There’s two things which I realised only after the presentation:

  • First, it’s not so much the specifics of the modeling solution that I presented. The most interesting part for the audience is rather the fact that agriculture is turning into a data-driven discipline. I caught a lot of comments along the lines of „It’s amazing what kind and what amounts of data are nowadays collected in agriculture.“
  • The other thing is that the specific modeling setup I presented is likely to be valid since the results obtained with this setup are the ones that would normally be expected. So, it’s not so much the result that REIP49 is the best predictor, but rather that the setup I created may be used for future variable importance assessment as new data come in.

I already guessed the first point, but the second one only occurred to me in hindsight. Seems to happen rather often in research, though.

Mai 20th, 2010

Staying at the Biosphere II site

Biosphere II, Arizona, USA

Biosphere II, Arizona, USA


As planned, I’m currently at the Biosphere II, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. The conference is great, there are no parallel sessions, I can actually talk to everyone and I know roughly what everyone’s doing. We had our greenhouse tour yesterday and it was quite impressive to see such a huge structure being completely sealed from the outside.

My previous talk at UW went rather smoothly. When listening to the IDA sessions yesterday I already had a few more ideas to make my thesis somewhat more reviewer-proof — seems like a side-effect of conferences when other people’s work has an inspiring effect on one’s own work.

Mai 14th, 2010

Slides for the talk at the IDA 2010 conference

My slides for the IDA’2010 conference are here:russ2010ida-slides.pdf. My upcoming talk at the University of Waterloo will be meandering along the same lines. The respective publication for the IDA conference is here: Spatial Variable Importance Assessment for Yield Prediction in Precision Agriculture. There’s also the Springerlink URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/p63pn0561u18r34w/.

Mai 12th, 2010

Invited talk at the University of Waterloo

I’ll be giving a talk at the University of Waterloo, Canada on Monday, May 17th, 2010. The following is from the invitation e-mail to this talk:

„Spatial data mining in precision agriculture“ is the topic of a talk
on Monday May 17 at 2pm in room EV1-1001 by PhD candidate Georg Ruß
from the Computational Intelligence group at the University of
Magdeburg, Germany. Mr. Ruß will introduce us to the utility of
geomatics technologies in precision agriculture, and present novel
spatial data mining tools that can be used to optimize the spatial
allocation of fertilizer and pesticide doses in site-specific crop
management. This involves novel statistical and machine-learning
techniques such as the support vector machine, spatial
cross-validation, and spatial clustering algorithms, as well as lots
and lots of high-resolution geodata.

The invitation was offered by Alexander Brenning. I’ll be traveling further to Tucson/Oracle/Biosphere II/Arizona for the IDA 2010 conference. Further information is going to be given right here in due course.

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