The past six weeks on vacation and at the Milano WCC conference had me sort my ideas into a likely dissertation structure. It is somewhat a follow-up on this AI-2008 announcement article, although the ideas in that blog post are not exactly what ended up being in the conference paper (self-organizing maps).
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This World Computer Congress 2008 in Milano, Italy, is huge. The gala dinner in the large Milano Convention Centre’s Auditorium seated roughly 1,000 people. Even if there were only 800 there, it still is massive and impressive.

We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning for IFIP-AI 2008 in Milano, Italy. The conference is part of the World Computer Congress. My talk will be on Monday afternoon and I’m going to be chairing my own session there (.pdf program). The slides (.pdf, 1.1MB) are slightly different from the ICDM ones since the work differs slightly, too. Upon returning from this conference, I’ll start working again at University, even though I’m technically still on vacation. There is also the structure of my PhD thesis that needs to be written down which I’ll probably do next week.

In der deutschen September-Ausgabe der Technology Review ist ein fünfseitiger Report mit dem Titel „Gezielt zu mehr Ertrag“ abgedruckt, der wiederum einen guten, allerdings ob der Kürze auch oberflächlichen Eindruck des breit gefächerten Themengebiets Precision Farming bietet. Unter anderem werden die Preagro-Projekte erwähnt sowie Firmen wie Rapid Eye oder Agro-Sat. Abseits des Artikels wurde hauptsächlich aufgrund der hohen Düngerpreise K+S in den DAX aufgenommen, was ein gutes Indiz für die steigende Bedeutung der Landwirtschaft und ihrer Zulieferer ist.

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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As noted in the previous blog post, last week I attended IPMU 2008. My presentation that featured the work done with the agriculture data went smoothly. There was a guy from Caterpillar who had his talk right before mine who was very aware of what I was doing and definitely knew what I was talking about. I asked him afterwards and it turned out that he grew up on a farm. I still need to study some American accents because I don’t know exactly where to put him. There were a lot of other presentations and (at least at the gala dinner) around 250 participants with (at most) five parallel sessions which is a lot of research work in a very short time.
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My final slides for IPMU 2008. My presentation is scheduled for Thursday, June 26th, in the „Applications II“ section. The corresponding paper can be downloaded at our working group’s publication database.

In this post I referred to an upcoming paper that we were preparing for submitting to the SGAI AI-2008. The paper is currently in the reviewing process. If you’re interested, the draft can be downloaded from our research group’s publication database. Feel free to read it and leave your comments in this blog.

My slides for IPMU 2008, at least as a draft, as the conference is still some days away.

Recently, I was looking up one of the sensor attributes that I’m using in my data sets (REIP32) and the google search responded with exactly six hits, of which the first and third referred to this very blog. The second hit yielded a presentation of Peter Wagner, who happens to be the head of the working group at Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg that I received the data from. Since I’m preparing slides for my end-of-month talk at IPMU2008 and if someone wants to see a thorough view on what work has been done so far in this area, have a look at his slides (pdf, 2.5MB). My talk is likely to meander along the same lines, but I’ll probably emphasize the data mining and modeling aspects.

I will probably also show the talk and my slides to the students in next week’s exercise courses, just to give them an idea of what can be done with neural networks. It helps me in explaining and it fits perfectly, since the course is on „Neural Networks“ anyway.