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.