The seminar gave a introduction to data mining for local businesses and was attended by almost 50 guests. Presentations were given by Professor Vic Rayward-Smith and Dr George Smith from SYS’s Data Mining group which has international experience in both commercial and academic data mining projects. SYS also welcomed Professor Nikolaos Tzokas from the School of Management who spoke about the business perspective of data mining and why data is critical to modern companies.

Introduction to Data Mining
Dr George D Smith
Senior Lecturer, School of Information Systems

George introduced the area of data mining and explained that it is the process of extracting valuable, useful and understandable patterns from the large volumes of data being collected by today’s organisations. Once this knowledge has been extracted from your historical data, it can be used to make predictions about future events. By discussing the KDD process, George explained the importance of planning your data mining experience and following an established methodology. To bring the content right up-to-date, George explained why web mining and e-commerce mining are becoming increasingly important to the modern business.

The Business Case
Professor Nikolaos Tzokas
Director of Research, School of Managament

To justify the business case for data mining, Nikolaos spoke about the "remember, learn, act" procedure where companies should first look at what has happened, then examine why, so that they can make informed decisions about future events. Nikolaos also looked at the key knowledge areas for success and customer segmentation before presenting an example of how Accenture has used clustering to identify segments for usage on the Internet.

Data Mining at UEA
Professor Vic Rayward-Smith
Dean, School of Information Systems

Vic led the third presentation by describing the projects and research that UEA has been involved in during the past eight years. Commercial projects have been completed with a number of major organisations, with particular success in the financial services sector looking at issues surrounding fraudulent claims, pricing policies, mailshots, cross-sales and clustering. Other sectors that UEA has been involved with included health, e-commerce, telecomms, military, bioinformatics and weather. Vic concluded the evening by talking about the ways in which data mining projects at UEA can be funded and how the interest has led to establishing a new MSc at UEA in Knowledge Extraction.

As well as the presentations, there was an opportunity for informal discussions with experienced data mining researchers and consultants who discussed the potential of the data being collected various Organisations.

As part of a continued introductory offer, attendance was free and included a buffet supper. This was the second in a series of evening events hosted at UEA following last months EMMA Networking Event.

Future Events
For those that are unable to attend the seminar at UEA, we are planning to hold a similar event in the Birmingham area later this year. If you wish to receive details of this seminar, please email www@sys-consulting.co.uk. Further details will be emailed to you when the date and venue have been finalised.