ICDM'04 Invited Talks

• Wray Buntine, Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, Finland

Open-source Search Engines: A Data Mining Platform

The ALVIS Consortium (http://www.alvis.info) and Search-Ina-Box are two projects that build open source search engines. The ALVIS partners believe the open source philosophy is ideal for next generation search platforms, and are bringing data mining researchers together with search and information retrieval professionals to develop such a platform. This talk will outline the tasks and the relevance of the effort to the data mining community.

Curriculum vitae:

Dr. Wray Buntine is known for his theoretical and applied work in decision trees, e.g. the IND software, and Bayesian graphical modeling, e.g. the most cited article "Operations for Learning with Graphical Models" in JAIR. Dr. Buntine is a former researcher with NASA has taught graduate courses at Stanford University. In addition to his academic career, he is a long time fan of Linux and has a development background as a lead architect and developer for a 24/7-uptime, scalable, client-server internet product delivering personalization. Before joining CoSCo at Helsinki Institute of Information Technology (HIIT) in January 2002 he was a consultant at Google and at NASA Ames Research Center working on statistical computing. He is now a Senior research Scientist responsible for the ALVIS Consortium and the Search-Ina-Box projects with Prof. Henry Tirri, and is developing statistical language models for information retrieval.

• David Hand, Imperial College, London

Deception, distortion, and discovery: data quality in data mining

Data mining is typically a process of secondary data analysis, using data which were originally collected for some other purpose. They may have been of high quality for that purpose, but of low quality for the unspecified future analyses of data mining, and it may be economically impracticable to require high quality data for all possible future analyses. This talk gives an overview of data quality, covering definitions, measurement, monitoring, and improvement. Some important special topics are discussed in detail, including missing values, anomaly detection, and deliberate data distortion. The talk is illustrated with real examples from a wide variety of areas.

Curriculum vitae:

David Hand is Professor of Statistics and Head of the Statistics Section at Imperial College London. He has published twenty books on statistics and related areas, including Discrimination and Classification, Analysis of Repeated Measures, Practical Longitudinal Data Analysis, Construction and Assessment of Classification Rules, Intelligent Data Analysis, Statistics in Finance, and Principles of Data Mining. He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries. He launched the journal Statistics and Computing in 1991, and also served a term of office as editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C. He was awarded the Thomas L. Saaty Prize for Applied Advances in the Mathematical and Management Sciences in 2001 and the Royal Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Silver in 2002, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy, the UK’s leading learned society for the humanities and social sciences, in 2003. His research interests include classification methods, the fundamentals of statistics, and data mining, and his applications interests include medicine and finance. He has acted as a consultant to a wide range of organisations, including governments, banks, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing industry, and health service providers.

• Thorsten Joachims, Cornell University, USA

Learning to Predict Complex Objects

Over the last decade, much of the research on discriminative learning has focused on problems like classification and regression, where the prediction is a single univariate variable. But what if we need to predict complex objects like trees, sequences, or orderings? Such problems arise, for example, when a natural language parser needs to predict the correct parse tree for a given sentence, when a navigation assistant needs to predict the route a user prefers for getting to the destination, or when a search engine needs to predict which ranking is best for a given query. This talk will explore the challenges in predicting complex objects. In particular, I will discuss support vector approaches that covers some of these problems. They generalize the idea of margins to complex prediction problems and a large range of loss functions. While the resulting training problems have exponential size, there is a simple algorithm that allows training in polynomial time. Empirical results will be given for several examples.

Curriculum vitae:

Thorsten Joachims is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. In 2001, he finished his dissertation with the title "The Maximum-Margin Approach to Learning Text Classifiers: Methods, Theory, and Algorithms", advised by Prof. Katharina Morik at the University of Dortmund. From there he also received his Diplom in Computer Science in 1997 with a thesis on WebWatcher, a browsing assistant for the Web. His research interests center on a synthesis of theory and system building in the field of machine learning, with a focus on Support Vector Machines and machine learning with text. He authored the SVM-Light algorithm and software for support vector learning. From 1994 to 1996 he was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University with Prof. Tom Mitchell.

• Ming Li, University of Waterloo, Canada

Faster and More Sensitive Homology Search

Homology search is the most popular task in bioinformatics. It is probably one of the largest data mining tasks second only to internet search. In the late 1970's, dynamic programming for homology search was introduced. In the 1980's Blast heuristics was introduced to trade sensitivity with speed. Today, a large fraction of world's supercomputing time is consumed by Blast and Smith-Waterman dynamic programming. The explosive growth of genomics data demands on significantly more sensitive (than Blast) and faster (than both Smith-Waterman and Blast) homology search software. Can we speed up homology search without compromising sensitivity? We introduce the fundamental ideas and the mathematical theory of optimized spaced seeds. Equipped with optimal spaced seeds, our program PatternHunter runs many times faster than Blast, at higher sensitivity levels. With multiple optimized spaced seeds, PatternHunter runs 3000 times faster than Smith-Waterman, at the same (full) sensitivity, bringing homology search back to a full circle.

Curriculum vitae:

Ming Li is a CRC Chair Professor in Bioinformatics, of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He is a recipient of Canada's E.W.R. Steacie Followship Award in 1996, and the 2001 Killam Fellowship. Together with Paul Vitanyi they pioneered applications of Kolmogorov complexity and co-authored the book "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications" (Springer-Verlag, 1993, 2nd Edition, 1997). He is a co-managing editor of Journal of Bioinformatics and Computatational Biology. He currently also serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Information and Computation, SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Journal of Software, and Journal of Computer Science and Technology.