Directly after the RCOMM, I was on vacation and therefore did not get the time to write something about RCOMM 2011 until now, sorry. Here is a review for those who visited the conference or who want to learn more about what happened in Dublin a couple of weeks ago.

RCOMM 2011 was again a huge success! It was great to meet many users of RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics again after the first community meeting in Dortmund last year. Many visitors from RCOMM 2010 also found their way to Dublin and started to build the core community around RapidMiner. So first of all: Thanks to all who attended and especially to those who contributed to the conference by giving a talk about their analysis work or new RapidMiner Extensions.

 A couple of participants enjoying the 2011 version of our now-famous game show "Who wants to be a Data Miner?"

Monday was a public holiday in Ireland, and so we started on Tuesday with two parallel half-day training courses, one for beginners and one for more experienced analysts. A second set of parallel training sessions took place on Friday morning directly before the exam.

Day 1

The actual conference started on Wednesday morning with an invited talk of Prof. Dr. Fionn Murtagh, who is the director of the Science Foundation Ireland and an experienced data analyst. He pointed out the usefulness of ultrametrics for clustering and exemplified this through a wide range of case studies. These included the Colombian social violence between 1990 and 2004 as well as some very interesting insights into optimal movie plots. Fionn is a great scientist and I enjoyed his talk very much. Matko Bošnjak and Nino Antulov-Fantulin of the Ruder Boškovic Institute then described analysis processes for recommendation systems in RapidMiner. They presented ready-to-go workflows which can simply be used or easily adapted to own situations and I am sure that many users will find those really useful. The templates are available on myExperiment with the RapidMiner Community Extension . They also pointed out the currently running data analysis challenge on TunedIT for recommender systems. Still 11 days left – you should consider participation! Beside the 5500 Euro price money, Rapid-I is also sponsoring a free trip to next year’s RCOMM 2012 for the best RapidMiner process!

I unfortunately missed the next session since I have a business event in parallel. Benjamin Schowe of the TU Dortmund presented his work about feature selection methods in RapidMiner and, afterwards, Marcin Blachnik of the University of Bielsko-Biala presented a new Extension for instance selection. I really was interested also in the next talk about Radoop , a combination of RapidMiner with the map & reduce framework Hadoop, but for a second time already I missed the talk of Zoltan Prekopcsak of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Nothing personal, Zoltan, and I am sure that we will collaborate in future anyway!

The next session covered various applications of RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. I was in particular excited to see a first contribution which already has used the new RapidMiner server RapidAnalytics given by Gábor Nagy of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics introducing a stock price prediction system based on RapidAnalytics. Afterwards, Simon Jupp of the University of Manchester presented a combination of RapidMiner with Taverna , a web service based workflow system offering lots of functionality for bioinformatics. The final talk in this session was given by Milan Vukicevic of the University of Belgrade about the classification of electricity customers with WhiBo decision trees.

The next session was divided into two parts: first, I gave a workshop about some basics of loop & macro usage. This was sort of a preparation for this year's game show "Who wants to be a Data Miner?". We got three tasks (hobbit genealogy, drawing a spiral, and distinguishing between vodka and presidents). I won the first one myself (yeah!), the second task was solved by Benjamin and Matko defended his title from 2010 in the third one. Thanks to all participants and congratulations to Benjamin and Matko!

Tomorrow I will add another post describing the second day of the conference and the certification exam. Stay tuned!