Four yellow Ortliebs

I’m taking ten weeks off, starting tomorrow. I’ll have my bike with me,
four yellow Ortlieb bags and a small backpack. Direction: North.

I’ll be back in the middle of October, when the winter term starts.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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).