Saturday, May 28, 2011

On mining and detection of human sentiments

An exhausting week,  followed by over-sleeping during the weekend (our weekend is Friday and Saturday), and a 2.5 hours session with the dentist in the middle.


This week I heard in one of the IBM internal meetings some impression from a customer meeting in Europe.
The topic was data mining, and the insight has been that mining is trying to learn patterns based on the past behavior.   This works in some cases, but might not be enough in other cases; the reason is that in some cases what we actually need to learn is human behavior, and assuming that past behavior is a good indicator may be wrong, thus the domain should be extended to analyzing and predicting human sentiments and human behavior.   This is, of course, not a new area,  and the behavioral sciences people are studying it for years, one notable work is the work on prospect theory, that brought Daniel Kahneman the Noble prize (the co-inventor of the prospect theory, Amos Tversky,  passed away before the Noble prize was given, and the prize is being awarded to living persons only).   There are other works in this area, and some are being used in reality.    Getting multi-disciplinary work is quite important for enabling intelligent systems and enable predictive analytics.  More on this - later. 

Sunday, May 22, 2011

DEBS 2011 - call for participation




ACM DEBS 2011 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION 

The ACM DEBS (Distributed Event Based System) is the flagship conference of the event-based systems community.
DEBS 2011 will be held in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA in July 11-15, 2011.   


The DEBS 2011 program is now available in 
http://debs2011.fzi.de/index.php/conference-programme

The conference includes:

*  23 Research papers 

*  10 Inudstrial papers

*   5 Tutorials

*  Gong Show

*  Demo and poster workshop

*  4 Keynote speakers:  
     Christopher Bird (chief architect, Sabre Airline Solutions);
     Donald F. Ferguson (CTO, CA); 
     Johannes Gehrke (Cornell University);
    Calton Pu (Georgia Institutue of Technology)

*  Special invited talk:  Eddie Epstein (IBM Research) on Watson -  the computer  program that won against the Jeopardy! human champions 

Registration site is open: 
http://debs2011.fzi.de/index.php/conference-registration  

Note that the early registation deadline is June 15.

See you all in Yorktown!