Forming a team for KDDCUP 2012 through Austin ACM SIGKDD

[David Boney]

The 2012 KDDCUP has started. I am forming a team to represent Austin ACM SIGKDD. The team will need Ph.D. level researchers, software engineers for coding, and system admins. I tentatively have a sponsor, a local cloud provider, to provide us with virtual machines to do the computing.

http://www.kddcup2012.org/

There are two tracks. One track is the predict which users (or information sources) one user might follow in Tencent Weibo. The other track is to predict the click-through rate of ads given the query and user information. I favor the second track because there are a number of Austin firms that have some interest in ad predictions, which may generate greater participation. We can discuss this at our first organization meeting. According to the rules of the KDDCUP competition, you can only participate on one team during the competition.

There are cash prizes associated with the competition: $5000 for first prize, $2000, for second prize, $1000 for third prize. For those who participate on the Austin ACM SIGKDD team, I am requesting in the event we win that the prize money be donated to Austin ACM SIGKDD so the money can be used to support chapter programs such as bringing in out of town speakers.

Initially, I will be starting the data analysis with R. Many people who attend Austin ACM SIGKDD are interested in machine learning and Hadoop. We can consider a Hadoop based solution if the problem warrants it or if we want to do if for self-education.

We have a limited time to get things going. The data was released on March 1, 2012. The competition runs from March 15, 2012 to June 1, 2012. Please come to this Wednesday's, March 14th,  Austin ACM SIGKDD meeting if you are interested in participating on the team, or drop me a line.

http://www.kddcup2012.org/

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Sincerely,

David Boney

Chair Austin ACM SIGKDD

li...@semanticartifacts.com

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/austinsigkdd/