The 8th Industrial Conference on Data Mining, held in Leipzig, was clearly the most worthwile conference for me so far. There were no parallel sessions, I was able to talk for about 30 minutes, presenting the paper from the proceedings as well as some things that would otherwise have been future work. And, most important, I had immediate and massive feedback: roughly ten questions right at the end of my talk and another one or two hours of discussion with other authors during the breaks or the socializing events. Moreover, I even understood most of the other talks and was interested in hearing them which was not quite the case for the recent IPMU conference. If I have some interesting work to show, I will clearly apply for next year’s ICDM, too.
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From tomorrow for the rest of this week I’ll be commuting from Magdeburg to Leipzig for visiting ICDM 2008. The conference audience is probably smaller than the IMPU 2008 audience, there are no parallel sessions and only 33 talks distributed over three days. The talks are also longer (up to 30min total time), which made me extend my talk by our work in progress using self-organizing maps because it runs along the same lines and uses the ideas that are in the paper submitted to ICDM 2008. I’ll publish the current version of the slides via the following link (and update, if necessary): http://iws.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~russ/scientificwork/slides/slides-2008icdm.pdf. My talk will be the fourth on Wednesday morning, right before the coffee break.

As recent as of March 28th, another paper of my/our work on the agriculture data got accepted. The conference is the Industrial Conference on Data Mining 2008, which will be taking place not far away in Leipzig, Germany. Based on the results and the information from those conferences, I might try to submit advanced work at BCS AI-2008, which will again take place at (frosty) Peterhouse College in Cambridge, UK. I won’t be there for long, though, as offspring is already on his/her way.

There are quite a few deadlines for publications approaching in January and I will submit another paper detailing some of the recent accomplishments on the agriculture data there. One of the conferences is ICDM 2008, held in Leipzig, Germany. It targets industrial applications of data mining and I felt the paper fit in there quite nicely.

I have also received more data sets from Martin Schneider at Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg which will have to be mined. There are quite a lot of interesting tasks to be performed on those data — that requires thorough planning. I probably won’t be able to do that planning until my return from the organizational business trip to Melbourne, starting a cooperation project between our research group and the one that I worked with in 2004/2005.

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