CFP: KDD Workshop on Data Mining for Business Applications

[Carlos Soares]

Please distribute.
Best regards,
Carlos

x apologies for multiple postings x

** KDD Workshop on Data Mining for Business Applications


To be held with KDD 2008:
ACM International Conference on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
Las Vegas, NV
August 24, 2008

* MORE INFORMATION
http://labs.accenture.com/kdd2008_workshop/

* ORGANIZERS
Rayid Ghani, Accenture Technology Labs, rayid.ghani[at]accenture.com
Carlos Soares, University of Porto, csoares[at]liaad.up.pt
Francoise Soulie Fogelman, KXEN
Patrick Gallinari, University Pierre & Marie Curie
Katharina Probst, Accenture Technology Labs

* DESCRIPTION
Data Mining in various forms is becoming a major component of how 
businesses operate. Almost
every business process today involves some form of data mining. Customer 
Relationship
Management, Supply Chain Optimization, Demand Forecasting, Assortment 
Optimization, and
Business Intelligence are just some examples of business functions that 
have been impacted by
data mining techniques. More recently, data mining has become prominent 
on the Web (ads &
key-words, e-commerce ...) and is now making its way into new 
applications : fraud, security,
quality, industrial processes monitoring. The challenge of integrating 
massive amounts of data
from new sources (text, video, social networks) will shape the data 
mining applications of to-
morrow.
Even though data mining has become critical to businesses, most of the 
academic research in
data mining is mostly conducted on publicly available data sources. This 
is mainly due to two
reasons: 1) the unavailability of large, new, and interesting sources of 
data to academic
researchers. 2) limited access to domain experts who can provide a 
practical perspective on
existing problems and provide a new set of research problems. 
Corporations are typically wary of
releasing their internal data to academic and in most cases, there is 
limited interaction between
industry practitioners and academic researchers working on related 
problems in similar domains.
Companies that are involved in using leading-edge data mining often do 
not have any incentives
or opportunities to present their work in venues where academic 
researchers are present. This is
often the case because the requirements for presenting in these venues 
are often not suitable for
industry practitioners. We believe that the lack of this interaction is 
detrimental to both parties –
academic researchers and industry practitioners.

* GOALS
The goals of this workshop are:
1. Bring together researchers (from both academia and industry) as well 
as practitioners from
different fields to talk about their different perspectives and to share 
their latest problems and
ideas.
2. Attract business professionals who have access to interesting sources 
of data and business
problems but not the expertise in data mining to solve them effectively. 
This group would
otherwise not attend KDD and we believe through our personal experiences 
that it is essential for
KDD research community to interact with them.

* TOPICS OF INTEREST
The list of topics includes but is not limited to:
-fielded applications of data mining technology
-data mining applications as components of business processes
-how to sell data mining technology/projects inside your organization or 
to your customers
-integration of data mining technologies with other kind of technologies
-lessons learned from practice
-new classes of research problems motivated by real-world business problems
-new challenges in integrating unstructured data sources

* SUBMISSION
Submissions should be sent by May 19, 2008, in electronic form as a PDF 
(or Word) file, to rayid.ghani at accenture.com.

* IMPORTANT DATES
Papers Due: May 19
Notification: June 9
Final Version Due: June 16
Workshop: August 24