An interview with Edith Ohri ,a pioneer in Data Mining from Israel, one of the technologically and educationally advanced countries in Asia.
1) Tell us how you came in this field of work, and what factors made you succeed.
My introduction to data mining was at work right after my MS degree. The CEO of the company asked the IE department to organize the many small customer orders in groups that "make sense" for production, in a remote plant which the company had just opened. At the time, there was no solution available for this request. Whoever got the job was destined to months of laborious work. As a new comer I was assigned that unpopular job. Being new at that place, my problem with it was even greater: I had no knowledge about the production preferences and practices and could not had guessed what to assume and where to focus. This lack of expertise and inability to rely on expert knowledge or past conventions was as things turned out the key for success, as it forced me to rely on objective analysis alone.
2) Most challenging and fun project you ever did (anonymous details).
Every project is fun for me. It is always challenging to crack new complex data especially if previous analysis attempts have little results. In almost every project there is a surprising and interesting twist. I find it every time again very rewarding to discover hidden facts and then rationalize them with the client. Currently I’m working on an extremely large data set that requires farther software development. For me is
DECISION STATS 