Tag: software

More PAWS

Dr Eric Siegel  (interviewed here at https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/interview_eric-siege/ )

continues his series of excellent analytical conferences-

Oct 19-20 – WASHINGTON DC: PAW Conference & Workshops (pawcon.com/dc)

Oct 28-29 – SAN FRANCISCO: Workshop (businessprediction.com)

Nov 15-16 – LONDON: PAW Conference & Workshop (pawcon.com/london)

March 14-15, 2011 – SAN FRANCISCO: PAW Conference & Workshops

* Register by Sep 30 for PAW London Early-Bird – Save £200
* http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

* For the Oct 28-29 workshop, see http://businessprediction.com

———————–

INFORMATION ABOUT THE PAW CONFERENCES:

Predictive Analytics World ( http://pawcon.com ) is the business-focused event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners, covering today’s commercial deployment of predictive analytics, across industries and across software vendors.

PAW delivers the best case studies, expertise, keynotes, sessions, workshops, exposition, expert panel, live demos, networking coffee breaks, reception, birds-of-a-feather lunches, brand-name enterprise leaders, and industry heavyweights in the business.

Case study presentations cover campaign targeting, churn modeling, next-best-offer, selecting marketing channels, global analytics deployment, email marketing, HR candidate search, and other innovative applications. The Conference agendas cover hot topics such as social data, text mining, search marketing, risk management, uplift (incremental lift) modeling, survey analysis, consumer privacy, sales force optimization and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

PAW delivers two rich conference programs in Oct./Nov. with very little content overlap featuring a wealth of speakers with front-line experience. See which one is best for you:

PAW’s DC 2010 (Oct 19-20) program includes over 25 sessions across two tracks – an “All Audiences” and an “Expert/Practitioner” track — so you can witness how predictive analytics is applied at 1-800-FLOWERS, CIBC, Corporate Executive Board, Forrester, LifeLine, Macy’s, MetLife, Miles Kimball, Monster, Paychex, PayPal (eBay), SunTrust, Target, UPMC Health Plan, Xerox, YMCA, and Yahoo!, plus special examples from the U.S. government agencies DoD, DHS, and SSA.

Sign up for event updates in the US http://pawcon.com/signup-us.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/dc/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/dc
Register: http://pawcon.com/dc/register.php

PAW London 2010 (Nov 15-16) will feature over 20 speakers from 10 countries with case studies from leading enterprises in e-commerce, finance, healthcare, retail, and telecom such as Canadian Automobile Association, Chessmetrics, e-Dialog, Hamburger Sparkasse, Jeevansathi.com (India’s 2nd-largest matrimony portal), Life Line Screening, Lloyds TSB, Naukri.com (India’s number 1 job portal), Overtoom, SABMiller, Univ. of Melbourne, and US Bank, plus special examples from Anheuser-Busch, Disney, HP, HSBC, Pfizer, U.S. SSA, WestWind Foundation and others.

Sign up for event updates in the UK http://pawcon.com/signup-uk.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/london/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/london
Register: http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

——————————-

PAW San Francisco Save-the-Date and Call-for-Speakers:

March 14-15, 2011
San Francisco Marriott Marquis
San Francisco, CA

PAW call-for-speakers information and submission form: (Due Oct 8)
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/submit.php

If you wish to receive periodic call-for-speakers notifications regarding Predictive Analytics World, email chair@predictiveanalyticsworld.com with the subject line “call-for-speakers notifications”.

Predictive Analytics World
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com
Washington DC – London – San Francisco

AsterData releases nCluster 4.6

From the press release

Aster Data nCluster 4.6, which includes a column data store, making Aster Data nCluster 4.6 the first platform with a unified SQL-MapReduce analytic framework on a hybrid row and column massively parallel processing (MPP) database management system (DBMS). The unified SQL-MapReduce analytic framework and Aster Data’s suite of 1000+ MapReduce-ready analytic functions, delivers a substantial breakthrough in richer, high performance analytics on large data volumes where data can be stored in either a row or column format.

With Aster Data nCluster 4.6, customers can choose the data format best suited to their needs and benefit from the power of Aster Data’s SQL-MapReduce analytic capabilities, providing maximum query performance by leveraging row-only, column-only, or hybrid storage strategies. Aster Data makes selection of the appropriate storage strategy easy with the new Data Model Express tool that determines the optimal data model based on a customer’s query workloads.  Both row and column stores in Aster Data nCluster 4.6 benefit from platform-level services including Online Precision Scaling™ on commodity hardware, dynamic workload management, and always-on availability, all of which now operate on both row and column stores. All 1000+ MapReduce-ready analytic functions released previously through Aster Data Analytic Foundation — a powerful suite of pre-built MapReduce analytic software building blocks — now run on a hybrid row and column architecture.  Aster Data nCluster 4.6 also includes new pre-built analytic functions, including decision trees and histograms. For custom analytic application development, the Aster Data IDE, Aster Data Developer Express, also fully and seamlessly supports the hybrid row and column store in Aster DatanCluster 4.6.

More advanced analytics infrastructure.

Linux= Who did what and how much?

A report distributed under Creative Commons 3 and available at

That shows Canonical — the commercial arm of Ubuntu — has contributed only about one percent of the code to the GNOME desktop for Linux. while Red Hat accounts for 17 percent of the code and Novell developers are responsible for about 11 percent. That prompted some heartburn from Mark, creator- founder Cannonical/ Ubuntu at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517

And it would be a very different story if it weren’t for the Mozilla folks and Netscape before them, and GNOME and KDE, and Google and everyone else who have exercised that stack in so many different ways, making it better along the way. There are tens of thousands of people who are not in any way shape or form associated with Ubuntu, who make this story real. Many of them have been working at it for more than a decade – it takes a long time to make an overnight success :) while Ubuntu has only been on the scene six years. So Ubuntu cannot be credited solely for the delight of its users.

Nevertheless, the Ubuntu Project does bring something unique, special and important to free software: a total commitment to everyday users and use cases, the idea that free software should be “for everyone” both economically and in ease of use, and a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there. I feel that commitment is a gift back to the people who built every one of those packages. If we can bring free software to ten times the audience, we have amplified the value of your generosity by a factor of ten, we have made every hour spent fixing an issue or making something amazing, ten times as valuable. I’m very proud to be spending the time and energy on Ubuntu that I do. Yes, I could do many other things, but I can’t think of another course which would have the same impact on the world.

I recognize that not everybody will feel the same way. Bringing their work to ten times the audience without contributing features might just feel like leeching, or increasing the flow of bug reports 10x. I suppose you could say that no matter how generous we are to downstream users, if upstream is only measuring code, then any generosity other than code won’t be registered. I don’t really know what to do about that – I didn’t found Ubuntu as a vehicle for getting lots of code written, that didn’t seem to me to be what the world needed.

Open source communities work like democracies with all noise whereas R and D within corporates have a stricter hierarchy. Still for all that – Ubuntu and Android have made Linux mainstream just as R has made statistical software available to all.

And Ubuntu also has great support for R (particularly the single click R Commander Install and Icon) available at http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/math/r-cran-rcmdr

John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award – 2011

Write code, win cash, and the glory. Deep bow to Father John M Chambers, inventor of S ,for endowing this award for statistical software creation by grads and undergrads.

An effort to be matched by companies like SAS, SPSS which after all came from grad school work. Now back to the competition, I gotta get my homies from U Tenn in a team ( I was a grad student last year though taking this year off due to medico- financial reasons)

John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award – 2011
Statistical Computing Section
American Statistical Association

The Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical
Association announces the competition for the John M.  Chambers
Statistical Software Award. In 1998 the Association for Computing
Machinery presented its Software System Award to John Chambers for the
design and development of S. Dr. Chambers generously donated his award
to the Statistical Computing Section to endow an annual prize for
statistical software written by an undergraduate or graduate student.
The prize carries with it a cash award of $1000, plus a substantial
allowance for travel to the annual Joint Statistical Meetings where
the award will be presented.

Teams of up to 3 people can participate in the competition, with the
cash award being split among team members. The travel allowance will
be given to just one individual in the team, who will be presented the
award at JSM.  To be eligible, the team must have designed and
implemented a piece of statistical software. The individual within
the team indicated to receive the travel allowance must have begun the
development while a student, and must either currently be a student,
or have completed all requirements for her/his last degree after
January 1, 2009.  To apply for the award, teams must provide the
following materials:

Current CV’s of all team members.

A letter from a faculty mentor at the academic institution of the
individual indicated to receive the travel award.  The letter
should confirm that the individual had substantial participation in
the development of the software, certify her/his student status
when the software began to be developed (and either the current
student status or the date of degree completion), and briefly
discuss the importance of the software to statistical practice.

A brief, one to two page description of the software, summarizing
what it does, how it does it, and why it is an important
contribution.  If the team member competing for the travel
allowance has continued developing the software after finishing
her/his studies, the description should indicate what was developed
when the individual was a student and what has been added since.

An installable software package with its source code for use by the
award committee. It should be accompanied by enough information to allow
the judges to effectively use and evaluate the software (including
its design considerations.)  This information can be provided in a
variety of ways, including but not limited to a user manual (paper
or electronic), a paper, a URL, and online help to the system.

All materials must be in English.  We prefer that electronic text be
submitted in Postscript or PDF.  The entries will be judged on a
variety of dimensions, including the importance and relevance for
statistical practice of the tasks performed by the software, ease of
use, clarity of description, elegance and availability for use by the
statistical community. Preference will be given to those entries that
are grounded in software design rather than calculation.  The decision
of the award committee is final.

All application materials must be received by 5:00pm EST, Monday,
February 21, 2011 at the address below.  The winner will be announced
in May and the award will be given at the 2011 Joint Statistical
Meetings.

Information on the competition can also be accessed on the website of
the Statistical Computing Section (www.statcomputing.org or see the
ASA website, www.amstat.org for a pointer), including the names and
contributions of previous winners.  Inquiries and application
materials should be emailed or mailed to:

Chambers Software Award
c/o Fei Chen
Avaya Labs
233 Mt Airy Rd.
Basking Ridge, NJ 07920
feic@avaya.com

KXEN Update

Update from a very good data mining software company, KXEN –

  1. Longtime Chairman and founder Roger Haddad is retiring but would be a Board Member. See his interview with Decisionstats here https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/interview-roger-haddad-founder-of-kxen-automated-modeling-software/ (note images were hidden due to migration from .com to .wordpress.com )
  2. New Members of Leadership are as-
John Ball, CEOJohn Ball
Chief Executive Officer

John Ball brings 20 years of experience in enterprise software, deep expertise in business intelligence and CRM applications, and a proven track record of success driving rapid growth at highly innovative companies.

Prior to joining KXEN, Mr. Ball served in several executive roles at salesforce.com, the leading provider of SaaS applications. Most recently, John served as VP & General Manager, Analytics and Reporting Products, where he spearheaded salesforce.com’s foray into CRM analytics and business intelligence. John also served as VP & General Manager, Service and Support Applications at salesforce.com, where he successfully grew the business to become the second largest and fastest growing product line at salesforce.com. Before salesforce.com, Ball was founder and CEO of Netonomy, the leading provider of customer self-service solutions for the telecommunications industry. Ball also held a number of executive roles at Business Objects, including General Manager, Web Products, where delivered to market the first 3 versions of WebIntelligence. Ball has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and a master’s degree in electric

I hope John atleast helps build a KXEN Force.com application- there are only 2 data mining apps there on App Exchange. Also on the wish list  more social media presence, a Web SaaS/Amazon API for KXEN, greater presence in American/Asian conferences, and a solution for SME’s (which cannot afford the premium pricing of the flagship solution. An alliance with bigger BI vendors like Oracle, SAP or IBM  for selling the great social network analysis.

Bill Russell as Non Executive Chairman-

Bill Russell as Non-executive Chairman of the Board, effective July 16 2010. Russell has 30 years of operational experience in enterprise software, with a special focus on business intelligence, analytics, and databases.Russell held a number of senior-level positions in his more than 20 years at Hewlett-Packard, including Vice President and General Manager of the multi-billion dollar Enterprise Systems Group. He has served as Non-executive Chairman of the Board for Sylantro Systems Corporation, webMethods Inc., and Network Physics, Inc. and has served as a board director for Cognos Inc. In addition to KXEN, Russell currently serves on the boards of Saba, PROS Holdings Inc., Global 360, ParAccel Inc., and B.T. Mancini Company.

Xavier Haffreingue as senior vice president, worldwide professional services and solutions.
He has almost 20 years of international enterprise software experience gained in the CRM, BI, Web and database sectors. Haffreingue joins KXEN from software provider Axway where he was VP global support operations. Prior to Axway, he held various leadership roles in the software industry, including VP self service solutions at Comverse Technologies and VP professional services and support at Netonomy, where he successfully delivered multi-million dollar projects across Europe, Asia-Pacific and Africa. Before that he was with Business Objects and Sybase, where he ran support and services in southern Europe managing over 2,500 customers in more than 20 countries.

David Guercio  as senior vice president, Americas field operations. Guercio brings to the role more than 25 years experience of building and managing high-achieving sales teams in the data mining, business intelligence and CRM markets. Guercio comes to KXEN from product lifecycle management vendor Centric Software, where he was EVP sales and client services. Prior to Centric, he was SVP worldwide sales and client services at Inxight Software, where he was also Chairman and CEO of the company’s Federal Systems Group, a subsidiary of Inxight that saw success in the US Federal Government intelligence market. The success in sales growth and penetration into the federal government led to the acquisition of Inxight by Business Objects in 2007, where Guercio then led the Inxight sales organization until Business Objects was acquired by SAP. Guercio was also a key member of the management team and a co-founder at Neovista, an early pioneer in data mining and predictive analytics. Additionally, he held the positions of director of sales and VP of professional services at Metaphor Computer Systems, one of the first data extraction solutions companies, which was acquired by IBM. During his career, Guercio also held executive positions at Resonate and SiGen.

3) Venture Capital funding to fund expansion-

It has closed $8 million in series D funding to further accelerate its growth and international expansion. The round was led by NextStage and included participation from existing investors XAnge Capital, Sofinnova Ventures, Saints Capital and Motorola Ventures.

This was done after John Ball had joined as CEO.

4) Continued kudos from analysts and customers for it’s technical excellence.

KXEN was named a leader in predictive analytics and data mining by Forrester Research (1) and was rated highest for commercial deployments of social network analytics by Frost & Sullivan (2)

Also it became an alliance partner of Accenture- which is also a prominent SAS partner as well.

In Database Optimization-

In KXEN V5.1, a new data manipulation module (ADM) is provided in conjunction with scoring to optimize database workloads and provide full in-database model deployment. Some leading data mining vendors are only now beginning to offer this kind of functionality, and then with only one or two selected databases, giving KXEN a more than five-year head start. Some other vendors are only offering generic SQL generation, not optimized for each database, and do not provide the wealth of possible outputs for their scoring equations: For example, real operational applications require not only to generate scores, but decision probabilities, error bars, individual input contributions – used to derive reasons of decision and more, which are available in KXEN in-database scoring modules.

Since 2005, KXEN has leveraged databases as the data manipulation engine for analytical dataset generation. In 2008, the ADM (Analytical Data Management) module delivered a major enhancement by providing a very easy to use data manipulation environment with unmatched productivity and efficiency. ADM works as a generator of optimized database-specific SQL code and comes with an integrated layer for the management of meta-data for analytics.

KXEN Modeling Factory- (similar to SAS’s recent product Rapid Predictive Modeler http://www.sas.com/resources/product-brief/rapid-predictive-modeler-brief.pdf and http://jtonedm.com/2010/09/02/first-look-rapid-predictive-modeler/)

KXEN Modeling Factory (KMF) has been designed to automate the development and maintenance of predictive analytics-intensive systems, especially systems that include large numbers of models, vast amounts of data or require frequent model refreshes. Information about each project and model is monitored and disseminated to ensure complete management and oversight and to facilitate continual improvement in business performance.

Main Functions

Schedule: creation of the Analytic Data Set (ADS), setup of how and when to score, setup of when and how to perform model retraining and refreshes …

Report: Monitormodel execution over time, Track changes in model quality over time, see how useful one variable is by considering its multiple instance in models …

Notification: Rather than having to wade through pages of event logs, KMF Department allows users to manage by exception through notifications.

Other products from KXEN have been covered here before https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/tag/kxen/ , including Structural Risk Minimization- https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/kxen-automated-regression-modeling/

Thats all for the KXEN update- all the best to the new management team and a splendid job done by Roger Haddad in creating what is France and Europe’s best known data mining company.

Note- Source – http://www.kxen.com


Trrrouble in land of R…and Open Source Suggestions

Recently some comments by Ross Ihake , founder of R Statistical Software on Revolution Analytics, leading commercial vendor of R….. came to my attention-

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/mail/archive/r-downunder/2010-May/000529.html

[R-downunder] Article on Revolution Analytics

Ross Ihaka ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz
Mon May 10 14:27:42 NZST 2010

On 09/05/10 09:52, Murray Jorgensen wrote:
> Perhaps of interest:
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/06/revolution_commercial_r/

Please note that R is "free software" not "open source".  These guys
are selling a GPLed work without disclosing the source to their part
of the work. I have complained to them and so far they have given me
the brush off. I am now considering my options.

Don't support these guys by buying their product. The are not feeding
back to the rights holders (the University of Auckland and I are rights
holders and they didn't even have the courtesy to contact us).

--
Ross Ihaka                         Email:  ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz
Department of Statistics           Phone:  (64-9) 373-7599 x 85054
University of Auckland             Fax:    (64-9) 373-7018
Private Bag 92019, Auckland
New Zealand
and from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/06/revolution_commercial_r/
Open source purists probably won't be all too happy to learn that Revolution is going to be employing an "open core" strategy, which means the core R programs will remain open source and be given tech support under a license model, but the key add-ons that make R more scalable will be closed source and sold under a separate license fee. Because most of those 2,500 add-ons for R were built by academics and Revolution wants to supplant SPSS and SAS as the tools used by students, Revolution will be giving the full single-user version of the R Enterprise stack away for free to academics. 
Conclusion-
So one co-founder of R is advocating not to buy from Revolution Analytics , which has the other co-founder of R, Gentleman on its board. 
Source- http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/aboutus/leadership.php

2) If Revolution Analytics is using 2500 packages for free but insisting on getting paid AND closing source of it’s packages (which is a technical point- how exactly can you prevent source code of a R package from being seen)

Maybe there can be a PACKAGE marketplace just like Android Apps, Facebook Apps, and Salesforce.com Apps – so atleast some of the thousands of R package developers can earn – sorry but email lists do not pay mortgages and no one is disputing the NEED for commercializing R or rewarding developers.

Though Barr created SAS, he gave up control to Goodnight and Sall https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/sas-early-days/

and Goodnight and Sall do pay their developers well- to the envy of not so well paid counterparts.

3) I really liked the innovation of Revolution Analytics RevoScalar, and I wish that the default R dataset be converted to XDF dataset so that it basically kills

off the R criticism of being slow on bigger datasets. But I also realize the need for creating an analytics marketplace for R developers and R students- so academic version of R being free and Revolution R being paid seems like a trade off.

Note- You can still get a job faster as a stats student if you mention SAS and not R as a statistical skill- not all stats students go into academics.

4) There can be more elegant ways of handling this than calling for ignoring each other as REVOLUTION and Ihake seem to be doing to each other.

I can almost hear people in Cary, NC chuckling at Norman Nie, long time SPSS opponent and now REVOLUTION CEO, and his antagonizing R’s academicians within 1 year of taking over- so I hope this ends well for all. The road to hell is paved with good intentions- so if REVOLUTION can share some source code with say R Core members (even Microsoft shares source code with partners)- and R Core and Revolution agree on a licensing royalty from each other, they can actually speed up R package creation rather than allow this 2 decade effort to end up like S and S plus and TIBCO did.

Maybe Richard Stallman can help-or maybe Ihaka has a better sense of where things will go down in a couple of years-he must know something-he invented it, didnt he

On 09/05/10 09:52, Murray Jorgensen wrote:
> Perhaps of interest:
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/06/revolution_commercial_r/

Please note that R is "free software" not "open source".  These guys
are selling a GPLed work without disclosing the source to their part
of the work. I have complained to them and so far they have given me
the brush off. I am now considering my options.

Don't support these guys by buying their product. The are not feeding
back to the rights holders (the University of Auckland and I are rights
holders and they didn't even have the courtesy to contact us).

--
Ross Ihaka                         Email:  ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz
Department of Statistics           Phone:  (64-9) 373-7599 x 85054
University of Auckland             Fax:    (64-9) 373-7018
Private Bag 92019, Auckland
New Zealand