The second day started with another invited talk, namely Matthias Reif of the Deutsche Forschungszentrum Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) talking about Towards Next-Generation Data Mining. Matthias has presented very interesting insights about new trends in data analysis, including the data-driven recommendation of classifiers and the prediction of classifier accuracy and resource consumption. He depicted the integration of those techniques into server-based solutions like RapidAnalytics which will be the next step towards a collaborative data analysis in the cloud. Very fascinating! Matej Mertik of the Faculty of Information Studies in Novo mesto  then presented an application of RapidMiner in the medial domain. I must admit that I did not fully get the connection between feature selection and the presented game of life approach but I am sure that we will get a chance to sort these things out later on. The session was concluded by Andrew Chisholm of the ITB with a talk about possibilities of cluster evaluations. This was really a great talk – within 30 minutes Andrew has perfectly explained his route through the pitfalls around unsupervised data analysis on a real-world problem. Andrew is an experienced speaker and told a great story with many nice ideas behind – it was really a pleasure to listen to him.

The second session on this day covered new Extensions for RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. The first talk of Radim Burget of the Brno University of Technology discussed their new Image Mining Extension which is already available on out marketplace (see below). It looks great and I will certainly give it a try soon! Afterwards, Milos Jovanovic of the University of Belgrade presented a combination of their WhiBo toolkit presented last year with a genetic programming approach. The result is an optimized decision tree composed of the single steps and sub-algorithms known from different decision trees and their implementations. This is pretty close to some ideas of my masters and PhD thesis so I very much liked this idea (go guys and make it multi-objective next!) ;-)

Simon Fischer presented new Extensions and the Rapid-I Marketplace.

Simon Fischer of Rapid-I concluded this session with an overview of upcoming RapidMiner Extensions and new features which will be release during the next weeks and months, including the new operator recommender . Simon has also presented the new marketplace (http://marketplace.rapid-i.com ), which serves as a central store for RapidMiner Extensions and analytical algorithms. Simon then showed some of the business analytics features of RapidAnalytics, namely the pixel-precise report designer and the integration of analytical results into interactive web-based reports.

The last session on the second day covered text and web mining. Felix Jungermann of the TU Dortmund presented new techniques for handling tree structures in RapidMiner. He showcased these extensions for information extraction and relation detection. Bruno Ohana of the ITB in Dublin then presented a hot topic right now: sentiment analysis and opinion mining – of course done with RapidMiner. This was an interesting talk and a comparison to other approaches demonstrated the very high quality of the results. The last talk of the conference by Clemens Forster of the Vienna University of Economics and Business also covered sentiment analysis in customer feedbacks.

Live music in the Temple Bar.

We made a trip to the Temple Bar district afterwards and visited some of the most famous pubs in Dublin. I tasted strawberry beer (well, interesting…) and had listened to good music. It was almost a miracle that more than 20 participants managed to visit the certification exam on Friday after this evening ;-)

Photos on the Rapid-I page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.197594186959171.63782.120786031306654

Thanks again for the great evening and also for the conference – I hope that we will all see each other next year at the latest!