One of the most fun events at the annual RapidMiner Community Meeting and Conference (RCOMM) is the live data mining process design competition "Who Wants to be a Data Miner?" In this competition, participants must design RapidMiner processes for a given goal within a few minutes. The tasks are related to data mining and data analysis, but are rather uncommon. In fact, most of the challenges ask for things RapidMiner was never supposed to do.

In 2010, we had posted the winning processes immediately after the conference. This year we did not do so because the processes depend on input files which could not easily be attached to these processes on myExperiment. As of RapidMiner 5.1.11 we have a new way of handling files making it easier to link RapidMiner processes against data files on the Web (more on this in this blog to come soon). Therefore, all data files are uploaded to Rapid-I webspace now, and the processes are also on myExperiment bundled in a pack .

The 2011 challenges were quite fun and were dealing with Hobbits, Vodka, and our latest, brand new product: RapidDraw. The processes are quite instructive and are worth playing around with. With the RapidMiner Community Extension you can download the processes directly from myExperiment into RapidMiner (just search for RCOMM). Alternatively, view the pack description on myExperiment.

Balázs Bárány has released a great new application (called MythMiner ) a couple of months ago. The goal for this application is to suggest TV programs based on the programs recorded by the user so far. This is similar to Tivo but it is based on the open source video recorder software MythTV . With MythMiner, the users of MythTV can now receive daily suggestions for new TV programs they might be interested in. MythMiner can even automatically schedule recordings of interesting programs if the user likes. Here is the link to the system:

http://tud.at/programm/mythminer/

MythMiner makes use of RapidMiner or RapidAnalytics and is basically a pretty complex analysis process  which performs a classification for "interestingness" based on the previously recorded programs. More information can be found in this forum post .

Balázs Bárány is presenting MythMiner in a talk at the Linuxwochen in Vienna on Saturday, May 7th, 2011. So if you are coming from Austria, I am sure that visiting his talk will be an interesting and inspiring experience.

Schedule: http://www.linuxwochen.at/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=216&Itemid=40