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.

This is more of a quick idea that arose when I thought of the correlation between the size of the conference and the number of serious questions that were asked right after my respective talks. For me, the plot looks as follows:

(Your mileage may vary!)

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

At the moment we’re in the final stage of preparing one paper that presents our SOM research from recent months on the agriculture data. Future ideas will probably (at least in part) result from exploiting the SOM toolbox further. Some hints as to what’s possible can be found in the gallery.