ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

DS* PUTTING DATA MINING TO WORK: THE SEQUEL, PART II
by Michael J.A. Berry

Michael J. A. Berry is a client partner and director of the data mining center at Naviant Technology Solutions. Along with Gordon Linoff, also of Naviant, he is author of Data Mining Techniques for Marketing, Sales and Customer Support (1997, John Wiley & Sons). For more information on the book, see http://www.data-miners.com For more information on Naviant Technology Solutions, see http://www.naviant.com This article is the second and concluding part of D S * article 100061 dealing with a data mining project for a cellular phone company. In it, Berry writes: "The marketing data, while considerably more mining-ready than the call detail data, also required some preparation. Fields with unique values such as account and mobile number were dropped. New fields representing various historical ratios, length of tenure, and aggregate counts of promotions and features were added. Once the data was ready, it was fed into a data mining product..."

DS* SGI'S FORMER CIO MIKE GRAVES DISCUSSES STRATEGIES FOR NEW INFO ENABLEMENT
by Alan Beck, editor in chief

D S * interviewed Mike Graves, former CIO of Silicon Graphics and principal architect of that firm's cutting-edge IT infrastructure, about exactly what it takes to insure corporate success in a business environment characterized by burgeoning complexity and information overload.

Graves observed: "There has recently been much discussion over questions of: 'What is an information-age company?' and 'How can firms move away from the paradigm they've followed for the last 200 years?' From my perspective, the difference is that we now empowering a group of people who, through information, are enabling a transformation from data through information to knowledge. On that spectrum there exists a group of knowledge-workers who are contributing at a much greater level to the corporations they are part of. At the most sophisticated end of this spectrum there is a type of individual we call the knowledge athlete..."

DS* DATA MINING: THE TWO CULTURES, PART II
by Robert Grossman

Robert Grossman is president and CEO of Magnify, Inc. He is also Professor of Mathematics, Statistics & Computer Science at Center for Data Mining at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in database computing. He has organized and led a number of workshops on datamining, object-oriented databases, & knowledge discovery.

In this concluding segment of D S * article 100063 , Grossman notes:
"The essence of data mining is machine learning...Both the PM and DM traditions, start with a space of learning sets L. Each element of the space is a particular learning set, that is some data set which is to be analyzed automatically."

DS* New Venture from Lucent Technologies Offers Businesses Better Decision Making Through Data Analysis
Lucent Technologies has announced a new business venture that will offer a unique software product that uncovers and displays trends and patterns often buried in large amounts of data. Called Visual Insights, the venture will use Bell Labs software to help businesses make faster, better decisions, the company said.

DS* Thinking Machines Corporation Raises Capital for Expansion
Thinking Machines Corporation, a leading provider of advanced data mining solutions for the financial services, telecommunications and database marketing industries, has announced that it has raised $3.15 million from existing investors.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"There is now recognition that most of the work currently conducted in business is left-brain activity. Visualization will prove crucial to engaging the creative right-brain..."
-- Mike Graves, former CIO of SGI

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