DATA MINING AND THE GOVERNMENT: IS THERE A UNIQUE CHALLENGE?
by Patricia L. Carbone

Patricia L. Carbone is the Manager of the Intelligent Information Management and Exploitation Technology Area at the MITRE Corporation. She is also a point of contact for the MITRE Washington Artificial Intelligence Center. Ms. Carbone is currently working on her Ph.D. in Data Mining in the School of Information Technology and Engineering at George Mason University. She holds an M.S. from The Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. from the University of Miami. Ms. Carbone's research is in the area of data mining, intelligent databases, data mediation, data consistency, active databases, and expert database systems.

Her current projects include exploring the use of data mining for the Anti-Drug Network, performing an empirical study on various incremental learning algorithms to determine which is best for active data mining, and advising DARPA on architectural issues that must be considered to ensure the development of intelligent information systems. In addition, she is the Lead of the Intelligent Information Processing Technology Area Team for MITREs Technology Program.

Ms. Carbone is a member of IEEE and ACM SIGMOD. She served as the Registration Chair for the 1993 ACM SIGMOD Conference held in Washington, DC. She recently served as the Co-Chair of the AFCEA First Federal Data Mining Symposium. She has also served on two NSF Panels reviewing proposals in the areas of data mining.

DATA WAREHOUSING: A CATALYST FOR OPERATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT: PART I
by Kathy Long

Kathy Long is a Principal Consultant with Spectrum Technology Group. She has enjoyed a diverse career in the information systems field over the past 16 years, working as a business analyst, data and process modeler, meta-data analyst, and application designer. She has managed a variety of projects including strategic business modeling, data integration and systems development in the manufacturing, natural gas, pharmaceutical, consumer products and telecommunications fields. As a consultant with Spectrum's data warehousing practice, she has played a lead role in several full-lifecycle data warehouse iterations that defined sales, cost, product supply chain and inventory analytical information. Ms. Long is experienced in data migration design, logical and dimensional modeling, meta-data architecture and analytical information requirements definition.

In part one of a two-part series, Long writes: "Data warehousing is the enterprise-wide transformation of historical raw data into business intelligence. To compete and grow in today's dynamic business market, decision makers need to have their hands directly on the pulse of the business. Business strategy is formed. Plans are put into action. Actions are measured. Analysts need flexible, immediate access to high quality, actionable information that can be used to measure today's performance and formulate tomorrow's winning strategies. Data warehousing provides the information critical to business survival."

DATA MINING, MODELING, & PREDICTIVE-SERVICES: ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT
by John Thompson, Vice President - Marketing, Magnify Inc

Founded in 1991, Magnify, Inc. provides innovative data mining solutions to maximize the intrinsic value of the rapidly expanding data resources of Global 2000 companies. Based in Chicago, Magnify's mission is to continue to produce award-winning software and complete applications that will discover, explain, and predict rare and critical patterns in databases up to and including multiple terabytes.

Magnify maintains partnerships with Tandem Computers Inc., Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNSW), Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL), Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HWP) and Informix Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: IFMX). Magnify, Inc. and Magnify Research, Inc., which develops products and integrates systems for the federal government, are subsidiaries of Magnify Holdings Corporation.

For more information access Magnify's Web site at http://www.magnify.com , or send e-mail to info@magnify.com

Thompson comments: "The previous two articles have highlighted how breaking down the functionality of traditional data mining systems can benefit firms that are interested in augmenting their existing decision making systems. This article details the organizational and human resources framework in which a decomposed and distributed data mining system would operate."
Ref: 100170, 100173.

ACTION ITEMS

Intelliquest Adopts Trajecta's dbProphet Predictive Modeling Software
Trajecta, Inc. has announced an agreement to provide products and services to IntelliQuest Information Group, Inc., a leading provider of information-based marketing services to the technology industry. IntelliQuest will utilize Trajecta's dbProphet software to provide its clients with sophisticated analysis of their marketing and awareness building efforts.

Ascent Technology Deploys IONA Technologies' Orbix in Airline Decision Support System
Ascent Technology, a leading provider of resource scheduling and allocation systems for the air transport industry, is using IONA Technologies' Orbix family of products to implement Ascent's complex, mission-critical solutions to logistical challenges facing air transport organizations. Ascent uses Orbix as the middleware infrastructure for its ARIS products which enable aircraft routing and gate information display.

TimesTen Option Now Shipping With Prism's Executive Suite
TimesTen Performance Software and Prism Solutions Inc. have announced the availability of the TimesTen Option with the Prism Executive Suite as part of Prism's new Right Choice Architecture. The TimesTen Option allows Prism's data warehouse customers to transform production data into their data warehouse 30-50 times faster than without the option.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"(W)e are now getting into data that is being collected in real time to enable real-time decision-making that actually mean the difference between life and death situations."
-- Patricia L. Carbone

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