My comments to Predictive Analytics World – San Francisco 2009
Predictive Analytics World was probably the best analytics conference I have attended, from a knowledge point of view, in a long time.
I am really excited and energized by both the actual presentations and also, without doubt, the depth of people attending. I was present at the following sessions:
- Five Ways to lower costs with Predictive Analytics, by Eric Siegel
- Identifying Fraud with Predictive Analytics, by David McMichael
- New Challenges in Predictive Analytics, by Usama Fayyad
- Netflix. Advanced Approached for Recommender System, by Andreas Toscher
- Netflix. Visualizations, by Todd Holloway
- Models versus large amounts of Raw Data, by Anand Rajaraman
The biggest direct output of this conference, for me, was the viewpoint and attitude on problem solving for how we at Yahoo! could move closer to our goal of actually provide real Recommendations within our Yahoo! Web Analytics reporting interface. I was also honestly inspired by the, quite obvious yet powerful, idea of Raw Data winning over Models, that Anand presented, which is great food for thought.
As a final point and as icing on the cake, it was of great value having the opportunity to network with SMART people like Markus Frind the CEO from Plentyoffish, Dan Steinberg the CEO of Salford Systems, Nachum Shacham from the algorithms group at efficient frontier, Anand Rajaraman the founder of Kosmix (which is actually a really cool search), David Rogers the senior web analytics researcher at PayPal, Madhu Shashanka research scientist from MARS, Ross Kaplan the principal Systems Engineer from SAS, John Liu associate Director of Analytics at Merkle, Brad Terrell the GM of Netezza… and all those bright folks that I forgot to mention.
To conclude, Predictive Analytics World turned into my new must-go-to conference, especially for those of us who attended Emetrics over the last couple of years and are looking for a positive and perhaps a bit more hardcore supplement! :-)
That said. Great work Matthew and see you at Emetrics in San Jose in May.
Cheers
Dennis
February 23rd, 2009 at 14:39
OK – so first I was merely annoyed that I missed all those great speakers on the first day of Predictive Analytics World while I was in Salt Lake City at the Omniture Summit. But now I’m really upset that I MISSED YOU Dennis! On the other hand, I did get to see Andreas S. Weigend, Former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, the Wells Fargo case study, Dean Abbott, Vijay Desai from SAS and Richard Vlasimsky from Valen Technologies. I also got a chance to chat with Arthur Hughes, and – to really prove the value of the event – with James Taylor and Usama Fayyad who spoke on Day One yet stayed for Day Two! The only disappointment was seeing Eric Siegel on crutches from “skiing like a 39 year old now that I’m 40.”
Dennis – see you at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Jose in May!
February 28th, 2009 at 22:57
Hey super! Did you also know that Eric Siegel started PATs? The equivalent of WAWs, PATs are Predictive Analytics Tuesdays. 8-)
So far they have been happening in S.F. and are waiting to become a world wide phenomenon such as the WAWs.
I had the chance to join the 2nd one of these. Was hoping for the 3d one in March. Sorry to hear about Eric’s skiing souvenir though. Hope that doesn’t mean we will have to put the next PAT on ice.
Akin
February 28th, 2009 at 23:16
PATs!? bloody brilliant :-)
NY anyone?
cheers
d.
March 3rd, 2009 at 18:02
[...] “Predictive Analytics World was probably the best analytics conference I have attended, from a knowledge point of view, in a long time… [and] turned into my new must-go-to conference.” Dennis R. Mortensen Director of Data Insights Yahoo! As stated on his blog [...]