As I mentioned some time ago, I got a paper accepted at the ICDM 2009 conference, held in Leipzig, Germany. I really liked this small type of conference last year and it was even better this year. The organisers had scheduled 32 presentations in three days, no parallel sessions and 25 minutes of talking time for every presenting author. At least from my point of view, this conference was very useful since it wasn’t that much about the theory of data mining or machine learning, but focused instead on the practical point of view. There were lots of industry people who just had their data problems and applied data mining to it. Theory is important, but practical applications are what makes the world go round. The invited talks by Claus Weihs and Andrea Ahlemeyer-Stubbe were really good examples of theory and practice. Claus Weihs could even remember that he had seen my data mining problem before, at the IFCS 2009 in Dresden, where there were a lot more presentations than at the ICDM.

Apart from that, I talked to Warwick Graco of the Australian Taxation Office, who happens to be in the programme committee of the
Australasian Data Mining Conference. This will take place in December this year and he encouraged me to submit a paper there. The deadline is by the end of this week and I’ll try to polish up a not-yet-finished internship report by Julia Preusse, who did her internship with Saman Halgamuge at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I’ll visit him soon.

The corresponding paper, which was published in the Springer LNAI series, is here: Data Mining of Agricultural Yield Data: A Comparison of Regression Models. Next year it’s going to be the 10th anniversary of the ICDM conference series and I’ll try to publish and present my work there again. These conferences have been the most valuable to me, also thanks to the great organisation team around Petra Perner.