Es geht bei http://ch.georgruss.de weiter.

Am gestrigen 23.02.2012 habe ich erfolgreich meine Dissertation mit dem Titel „Spatial Data Mining in Precision Agriculture“ verteidigt. Hier die Vortragsfolien dazu.

Tomorrow’s going to be my first (true) application lecture, at UFZ Leipzig. The slides are here:UFZ, Application Lecture 13.01.2012

There’s a preliminary deadline for handing in my thesis. I’m not sure whether I’m going to make it, but 2011-10-19 has been set as my personal deadline, before the thesis draft goes again to my supervisor. Lots of improvements yet to do. The official one is then 2011-11-23. The site’s header has been changed to reflect the actual topic of my PhD thesis.

Well, I updated the minihomer script described in this post. The issue was that the old script just output one GPX file describing the complete miniHomer’s log — currently around 23MB, comprising two continents. Although the GPX file is internally grouped into tracks, it’s quite cumbersome and slow to open with viking (which is not viking’s fault). Therefore, I added a few lines to use the gpxsplitter python script at the very end in the „dump“ option. It simply takes the existing gpx file and outputs single files containing just one track, which is exactly what I wanted.

Here’s the script: minihomertool, version 2011-09-24

Just before I head off into the weekend, the latest update on where I’ll be next week:

Industrial Conference on Data Mining, taking place from Tuesday August 30th until Saturday, September 3rd, in New York City (actually, it’s near Newark Airport [EWR] in New Jersey, but it’s close enough). I’ll be presenting a continuation of my work on HACC-spatial (the hierarchical agglomerative spatially constrained clustering) which I showed at my workshop and the ICDM 2010 conference last year.

Therefore, my talks‘ content will be along similar lines, with similar, but updated slides:

• russ2011icdm-slides.pdf
• russ2011dma-slides.pdf

The second talk for my workshop will also contain a few slides about the joint paper with Antonio Mucherino, who won’t be able to come personally, but who contributed a nice survey for my 2nd Workshop on Data Mining in Agriculture.

I’ve been nominated to serve as a country representative for Germany in the International Society of Precision Agriculture, which was founded more or less while I was at the ICPA2010 conference in Denver this year. Seems to take off soon.

On Tuesday I (and nine other students, all from the U.S.) finally got my ICPA
outstanding graduate student award at the ceremony held during lunchtime. I
haven’t been able to get an appropriate photo, but below there’s the award. I’m
not showing the cheque, though :-) My vision of Precision Agriculture which I had
to describe to receive this award has been posted here.

ICPA outstanding graduate student award

Georg Ruß, Raj Khosla, at ICPA 2010, Denver, Colorado

Raj Khosla, Georg Ruß, Dwayne Westfall, at ICPA 2010, Denver, Colorado

The above photos are from http://www.flickr.com/photos/zimmcomm/sets/72157624407942663/, slightly cropped, scaled and edited. The originals are here: photo1, photo2. There are more photos of the conference in that flickr album.
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I’m currently at Denver, Colorado, for the 10th International Conference on
Precision Agriculture. So far, it’s been quite interesting to see lots of talks
on what’s (for me) data analysis problems. It’s also nice to see that basic
linear regression is usually the tool which is being used as the most advanced
tool for any kind of prediction tasks. I’ll have too see whether throwing more
advanced data mining stuff at the existing problems is doing any good.

Presenting my talk at the ICPA 2010

My talk on the hierarchical spatial clustering I’ve developed for the purpose
of management zone delineation worked out okay. I think that I did a good job
on adapting my talk to this totally different audience, judging from the
feedback I received after the talk. It was really nice not having to explain
too much details on the data I have because the audience just knew those
attributes. I might even have gotten the point across about what the advantages
of my clustering are in comparison to existing approaches. The presentation slides
are here: russ2010icpa-slides.pdf

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I’m currently at ICDM in Berlin, the conference which took place in Leipzig in the past two years. Apart from the different location at Alexanderplatz, the quality is the same, and the conference is again very nice. Now that I’m a regular participant, I know a lot of the other people, which is nice if you want to talk to them without having a lot of introduction to do.

My work presented here is a continuation and extension of the IPMU work presented in Dortmund two weeks ago. Again, the emphasis is on getting data mining people into precision agriculture — they’re really needed there. The other aspect of my work is to make sure that spatial data are treated with spatial models, otherwise a lot of the assumptions for non-spatial models are violated and lead to misleading results.

In conjunction with the ICDM I’m holding my workshop on Data Mining in Agriculture for the first time. It’s going to be held this afternoon and so far I have only seen one of the three other presenters. The author of the book Data Mining in Agriculture, Antonio Mucherino, told me that he’s not about to come for personal, urgent reasons, which is a pity, but acceptable.

Some links to the above work: ICDM paper (in Springer LNAI series), DMA workshop paper, the workshop proceedings (of which I’m a co-editor).