Austin ACM SIGKDD - Monthly Summary

[David Boney <li...@semanticartifacts.com>]

The next meeting of Austin SIGKDD, Big Data Machine Learning Hackers Dojo, is Wednesday, March 7, 2012, 7:00 - 8:00 pm at Northwest Recreation Center. We have the meeting room from 6:30-9. 

Austin ACM SIGKDD received a charter from ACM and SIGKDD to be a local chapter of SIGKDD in February.

I am starting a local speakers bureau. I would like to have a monthly speaker. If you would like to make a presentation on machine learning, data mining, or semantic web, particularly as it related to "Big Data", drop me a line. It would be nice to get some of the industry based Ph.D. level researchers in Austin to come make a presentation.

ACM has a distinguished speakers group for which ACM will pay the travel cost for the distinguished speaker. I am looking for corporate sponsors who would be interested in underwriting the additional costs: hotel, food, and local transportation, for bringing a distinguished researcher to Austin to make a presentation on machine learning.

The Hackers Dojo is continuing in its study of Naive Bayes in Mahout. It is somewhat slow going but we have been going over the Mahout implementation of Naive Bayes, line by line. Last month, Misty reviewed the paper "Tackling the Poor Assumptions of Naive Bayes Text Classification", which the Mahout implementation is based on.  We are still discussing a possible project. The most popular idea is the do a fresh implementation of Naive Bayes which takes input from a table, versus documents as the current implementation. I am also in favor of adding the ability to do feature selection using a mutual information method.

Meeting Dates in March

March 7   - 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
March 14 - 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
March 21 - 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
March 28 - 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm

Please bring you laptop, a power cord, and a power strip. We need more power strips for the meeting.

Please join Austin SIGKDD to continue receiving announcements.
Here are the details on austinsigkdd:
Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/austinsigkdd 
Group email address: austinsigkdd@yahoogroups.com 

Northwest Recreation Center
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/parks/northwest.htm
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Sincerely,
David Boney
Chair Austin ACM SIGKDD
list@semanticartifacts.com
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/austinsigkdd/