Last week I also participated in the MLDM 2009, which is a biennial conference for Machine Learning and Data Mining, organised by the same team as the ICDM series. My paper was accepted as a poster presentation and I also chaired a session on association rules, which happens to be strongly related to my diploma thesis. The conference was a bit larger than the ICDM, with around 60 scheduled talks, of which 48 took place due to dropouts. It was a bit more theoretical than the ICDM, but still really worth it since usually the data mining problems were closely motivated by real-world problems.

The poster presentations were really useful and I was actually lucky because I had colourful SOMs and multi-dimensional scalings that I could easily put onto the poster. Since the audience wasn’t that large, every poster presenter was given two minutes to present his work to everyone and then the next poster was due. I seemed to be the only one who really stuck to this time frame and got my key points to the audience. I also ran into Frank Höppner, who is somewhat related to my supervisor Rudolf Kruse. In addition, I met Frederic Stahl, who is a PhD student with Max Bramer, and he has been to the SGAI conferences where I had also been visiting and presenting.

The paper for the visualisation work I did is available here: Visual Data Mining of Agriculture Data.