Bayes Like This

Details of a great talk on Bayes' rule: http://galweejit.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/ignite-notes-nobody-told-me-thered-be-bayes-like-this/

Probability & Statistical Inference, Back Where it Started

The Probability & Statistical Inference class tonight (Tuesday 13th December) will return to the lecture room in GA-028 in Kevin St (down the little corridor beside the shop).

Accenture Talk Rescheduled

Hello folks,

The talk by Accenture consulting has been rescheduled to Monday the 12th of December at 18:30 in KE4-008. Speaking will be Jacques Bellac, a member of Accenture's Global Analytics Innovation Centre here in Dublin, and Patrick Quinn, a former DIT graduate and current Accenture consultant.

Jacques and Patrick will be speaking about the work that they do in the Analytics Innovation Centre in Dublin and careers at Accenture so this promises to be a very interesting and useful session. Last year Accenture opened their Analytics Innovation Centre in Dublin and are actively recruiting at all levels.

See you there,

Brian.

MSc in Computing (Data Analytics) Exam Timetable

The MSc in Computing (Data Analytics) exam timetable has been released.

W285/W286/010C	Data Mining	Monday-09-January	1.00 - 3.00
W285/W286/1112C	Data and Database Design for Data Analysis	Tuesday-10-January	1.00 - 3.00
W285/W286/020C	Probability and Statiscal Inference	Wednesday-11-January	1.00 - 3.00
W286/1117C	Data Management	Thursday-12-January	1.00 - 3.00
W286/1115C	Systems Architectures	Friday-13-January	1.00 - 3.00
W286P/1102C	Ubiquitous Computing	Monday-16-January	1.00 - 3.00
W285/W286/012C	Security	Tuesday-17-January	1.00 - 3.00
W286A/1113C	Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques	Tuesday-17-January	1.00 - 3.00

5th December Data Mining

In the absence of the Accenture talk this evening (5th December) there will be no Data Mining class.

DT285/DT286 Probability & Statistical Inference Assignment Extension

The submission date for the Probability & Statistical Inference assignment has been extended until midnight on the 14th of December, 2011. The class on Tuesday the 6th will be held in the Aungier St. labs and be devoted to working on the assignment.

See you there.

Accenture Recruitment Talk Rescheduled

The Accenture recruitment talk has been rescheduled from Monday the 5th of December to Monday the 12th of December. It will still take place during the Data Mining class in KE 4-008 at 18:30.

Moneyball

If you haven't heard of it already (from such fabulous blog posts as Damian's), Moneyball is a great film that does a really nice job of showing off what we can do with analytics. It really showed off some of the key steps in an analytics projects:

Business question: win more games with cheap players

Analytics question: which players are most effective at wining games / what are the factors that most influence winning games

Insight: particular metrics (e.g. "getting on base") that baseball scouts etc typically aren't interested in are most effective at predicting wins

Decision: when buying players look for those with good on-base ratings and ignore other distracting factors (e.g. looking good in a uniform)

I also really liked the way they showed that while analytics gave an edge, the team still had to do all of the things that baseball teams do really well in order to be successful. Analytics just gave them an edge. Analytics is amazing, but it is not a silver bullet.

Also, there is a nice article on npr.org that discusses what can be done with data analytics:

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142521910/the-digital-breadcrumbs-that-lead-to-big-data

DT285/DT286 Probability & Statistics Class Cancelled

Hi folks,

The DIT networks have crashed this evening and so it is not possible for students to log on to lab machines. For this reason the DT285/DT286 lab class will be cancelled this evening. Aoife will, however, be present in the Aungier St. lab at 18:30 to answer any questions people have about the assignment.

Apologies for the short notice.

Brian.

Nice Interview with Hal Varian, Chief Economist for Google

techtarget.com had a nice interview a little while ago with Hal Varian, chief economist for Google. In the interview Varian discusses the role of data scientists. I particularly like the question where he lists the skills required for a data scientist:

"Database and data manipulation or how to shuffle data around and move things from place to place; statistics and statistical analysis; machine learning; visualization, or how to present data in a meaningful way; and communication or being able to describe what’s going on."

This is exactly the skillset we are creating on the Msc in Computing (Data Analytics) - in fact the skills almost uncannliy match our module names (http://www.comp.dit.ie/dt285/modules.html)!

The full interview is available at:

http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/news/1280099135/Googles-chief-economist-examines-the-data-scientist-factor

Probability & Statistical Inference Remains in Aungier St

The DT285/DT286 Probability & Statistical Inference will remain in the Aungier St 1-005 Lab tonight (Tuesday 15th of November).

See you there.

Google Prediction API

Google officially launched their Prediction API recently. This is a set of machine learning tools made available as a cloud-based API and the plan at Google is that people will use it to build "smart applications". There's some really nice stuff in there and it appears to make it fairly straight-forward to deploy ML based applications.

More details are available at: http://code.google.com/apis/predict/ and there's a video of their launch event here. It's also worth taking a good look around all of the Google APIs at http://code.google.com/apis/explorer, there's some good stuff in there.

Statistics Class In Aungier St 1-005 Lab

On Tuesday 8th of November Probability & Statistical Inference will return to the Aungier St 1-005 Lab for SAS Enterprise Guide work.

See you there.

Statistics Class Remains in Kevin St.

Probability & Statistical Inference class will remain in the ground floor Kevin St. lecture room (GA-028) this evening (Tuesday Nov 1st).

Class Cancelled

Due to the current weather conditions and major public transport issues, my classes today (Data & Databases for DA, and Advanced Databases) are cancelled.

The topics that we should have covered today will be covered during our timetabled class next week.

Regards
Brendan

SAS Server Update

I've received an email on Monday evening from SAS saying the following:

"Our system administrators have made changes to the hosted SAS Servers. Would you mind testing and letting me know if this has improved performance for you and your students?"


Can I you log into SAS OnDemand and test it using the lab notes.

Let me know if you notice and improvement in performance.

Thanks
Brendan

Statistics Class Back to Kevin St.

The Probability & Statistical Inference class on Tuesday 18th October will be back in room G028 in Kevin St. From now we will use both the labs in Aungier St and the lecture room in Kevin St depending on what content is being covered. Notice will be given on this blog and via email as early as possible.

New Data Mining Class

Due to the large number of MSc students who are taking the Data Mining class on a Monday evening, a additional class has been scheduled.

All full-time students must attend the new time slot. Any part-time students who can attend during the day should do so too.

The additional class will be on Thursday 10:00-13:00 in room KA-1-017 (computer lab on first floor of the annex building)

This new arrangement will commence week of 17th Oct.

Brendan

Judges Bans Bayes

An interesting story from the Guardian about the use of statistical evidence in court cases:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/oct/02/formula-justice-bayes-theorem-miscarriage

Lack of understanding seems to be the key issue.

Like Bon Jovi

Analytics practitioners are like "Bon Jovi ... circa 1986"! I'm not surer we should all start growing mullets and wearing tight trousers just yet but there is some interesting info in the following article about the importance of analytics:

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/09/26/data-scientists-are-rocking-the-big-data-world/

Data Management Postponed

The Data Management for continuing part-time MSc students class will not begin this Wednesday (21st September) - will be postponed until next week (Wednesday 28th September).

World Intellectual Property Day

William Fry solicitors are organising a briefing around World IP Day
on the evening of May 4th next and are looking to attract graduates
(or soon to be graduates) who have a particular interest in the area
of intellectual property.
It's ideally suited to people who are developing (or hoping to
develop) something innovative as there will be a team of IP lawyers on
hand to provide free advice. (I know lawyers and free in the same
sentence, where's the catch? But, of course they're looking for
potential new clients to work with).

If is interested contact the organisers.
http://www.williamfry.ie/gns/news-events/events/11-01-21/World-Intellectual-Property-Day---Designing-the-Future.aspx

You can mention Frank O'Reilly (a fellow student of yours)as a contact.

Semester 2 Exam Timetable

The grass is being cut again folks and that means it's time to think about exams. The MSc in Computing (Data Analytics) exam timetable is as follows:

Data & Database Design | Friday 20th May | 16:00 - 18:00

Machine Learning | Wednesday 25th May | 16:00 - 18:00

Enterprise Systems Integration | Thursday 26th May | 16:00 - 18:00

The timetable means that everything is over and done with in a week so as to make things easier on folks with work.

Analytics in Khan Academy Talk on TED.com

A TED.com talk by Salman Khan has been getting a lot of publicity recently:

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

The talk is about the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) which is a relatively new online education site. While some of the coverage on changing education and "flipping the classroom" might be a bit over the top (is asking students to watch a video before they come into class really that different to asking them to read the next chapter of their text book?) the data analytics behind the system looks really interesting. You need to get about half way through the video to see it but there are really nice visualisations showing student performance etc (I thought the graph showing the problems with streaming classes was a really powerful example of visualisation).

Gmail Priority Inbox & Explanation

Gmail Priority Inbox was launched a little while ago and is a nice system that attempts to learn to recognise the emails that are important to you and flag these as such - sort of reverse spam filtering.

The system uses a simple linear regression model to predict "importance" but customises the model, and the threshold used to get emails over the line into a user's priority inbox, based on a user's interaction with their mailbox. There's a nice paper about this by Google employees here.

The other nice thing I have noticed about this recently is that Google have included some nice explanation features - so when you look at an email you are told why it was classified as important. An example is shown below.

This is a nice example of an attempt to allow users look "inside" a machine learning-based application. It does, however, raise an interesting question. Given that users can now access information as to why particular classifications are made, what can they do about it? In the case of Google Priority Inbox, at the moment nothing. While we can tell the system that emails are important or not we cannot directly influence the decision making. This illustrates clearly the problem of balancing insight into the behaviour of machine learning-based applications with the resulting frustration users feel from not being able to change that behaviour.

Drop-in Session

Hi folks,

I hope you have settled into the new semester well and are enjoying your new modules.

To give students a chance to ask any questions or address any issues that have arisen for them on the programme I will be in room A3-020 this Thursday (10th March) from 17:45 to 18:30. There is no need to attend, but I will do my best to answer any questions or address any issues that arise.

We will have another similar session towards the end of the semester.

Regards,

Brian.

No such thing as bad results - just creative stats

For light relieft this week, statistical proof of the unstoppable rise of Brazilian rugby (subtitles).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKnQn-8PFII

Three Interesting Data Analytics (and Visualisation) Things

Three interesting analytics finds online this week folks.

First, an article from the Guardian newspaper about the new publicly available "crime map" from the UK (www.police.uk):

"All the crime map shows up is Whitehall's pointless zest for data" by Simon Jenkins

It seems to me that the author misses the power of making data accessible and the real problem is that the data being made available here is overly curated.

The next two are both visualisation tools. Hipmunk (www.hipmunk.com) is a flight search tool that visualises flight availability in an interesting new way. Also their derived variable "agony" would be well worth understanding more (how can you define such a subjective measure?). Prof. Barry Smyth from UCD has an interesting review on his blog.

Finally (and thanks to Colman McMahon for pointing this one out), LinkedIn have launched a tool called LinkedIn Maps (inmaps.linkedinlabs.com) to help you visualise your professional network. Again it would be interesting to know how they choose node colours, sizes and positions relative to each other. A very interesting tool though.

Data + Database Design for Data Analytics

Dr. Pierpaolo Dondio should have been in touch by email re this module.
Classes will start for this module on Wednesday Feb 16th
All material will be covered as expected

Timetable Update for Semester 2

Apologies for the lateness of the change - this is due to
lecturer timetable conflicts on another programme

The timetable for S2 will operate as follows:


Tue 18:30 20:30 KA - 3-020 Enterprise Systems Integration (Ronan Bradley)
Wed 18:30 21:30 KA - 3-020 Data and Database Design for Data Analytics (Pierpaolo Dondio)
Thu 18:30 21:30 KA - 3-020 SPEC 9270 Machine Learning (Brian MacNamee)

Semester 2 Timetable Update

MSc in Computing (Data Analytics) semester 2 timetable is as follows. At the moment all lectures are scheduled in KA 3-020 which is on the third floor of the newer side of Kevin St. However, please monitor this blog this week as rooms often need to change at the beginning of a semester.

Tuesday | 18:30 - 21:30 | KA 3-020 | "Data and Database Design" | Pierpaolo Dondio

Wednesday | 18:30 - 20:30 | KA 3-020 | "Enterprise Systems & Architectures" | Ronan Bradley

Thursday | 18:30 - 21:30 | KA 3-020 | "Machine Learning" | Brian Mac Namee

Timetable Semester 2

The modules available to you this semester will be

Data & Database Design for Data Analytics (Tuesday)
Enterprise Systems Integration (Wednesday)
Machine Learning (Thursday)

The timetable had to be adjusted to facilitate offering
Enterprise Systems Integration separately (as you are a large
group we can't mix you with the existing group)

I have had a number of queries re taking Case Studies this semester.
This is not available to you as we have not scheduled any specific
analytics speakers. It will be available in September,

Deirdre