Der von mir verlinkte Artikel zum Precision Farming in der Technology Review ist inzwischen online verfügbar.

Today I have started testing SVM regression models on the agriculture data that I’ve so far used for this year’s neural network publications. There are numerous implementations for SVM regression, some of which may be found at http://www.svms.org/software.html or http://www.support-vector-machines.org/SVM_soft.html.
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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.

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.
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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 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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