Revolutions

Webinar on Data Science, May 14

A quick note that I'll be giving my take on the question, "What is a Data Science" along with Carla Gentry (Analytical Solutions, @data_nerd on Twitter) and Gregory Piatetsky (KDNuggets, @kdnuggets on Twitter) in a free webinar this Tuesday, May 14. You can register here, and I've included the webinar description below. Please join us for what promises to be a lively discussion.

Data Scientist: Your Must-Have Business Investment NOW

Data science has been called the sexiest job of the 21^st century by the Harvard Business Review, and for good reason. Big Data and analytics are growing trends that require experts in interpreting the vast amounts of data being collected and transforming it into actionable insights. Those experts are Data Scientists, and we are lucky to be hosting a few of them for a one hour webinar.

Please join us on May 14th at 3pm EST as we host, Carla Gentry, Data Scientist at Analytical Solution, David Smith, Data Scientist at Revolution Analytics, Gregory Piatetsky, Editor, KDnuggets; co-founder KDD and ACM SIGKDD, Eric Kavanagh, DM Radio Host at Information Management Magazine, and Darren Peirce, CTO at Kalido.

Some of the topics we will explore in this open panel will include:

• The current state of data science and emerging trends
• What’s new on the tricks and tools landscape
• The role (and shortfalls) of traditional data warehouses
• Best practices in deploying data science to production

Register here to sign up for the webinar

Many thanks to Kalido for putting the panel together.

Webinar tomorrow: 100% R and More

A quick note that I'll be hosting our regularly-scheduled webinar, Revolution R Enterprise, 100% R and More, at 10AM Pacific tomorrow. If you're new to R, or want to learn about the power, scalability and productivity features of Revolution R Enterprise, this is a great place to start.

Revolution Analytics webinars: Revolution R Enterprise, 100% R and More

Heads-up: Big Data Hangout at 10AM PST

I'll be on a Google Hangout in a couple of hours to join a discussion on big data, analytics, and expert integrated systems. The conversation will be led by RedMonk's James Governor (@monkchips), and I'll be joining a panel of experts on big data and analytics:

• Stephen O'Grady, RedMonk (@sogrady) 
• Brandon Brown, Trident Marketing (@bbrownrdu)
• Panos Konstantindis, One Tree (@panoskds)
• Dwaine Snow, IBM ( @DwaineSnow)
• Dana Rafiee, Destiny Corporation (@Dana_Rafiee)

The Hangout starts at 10AM Pacific today. You can find information on how to join the Google Hangout (or simply watch the livestream or recording) at the link below.

Expert integrated systems blog: Opinionated Infrastructure video series: Panelist chat on big data, analytics, and expert integrated systems

Learn about R through data mining

If you're in San Francisco for this week's DeveloperWeek conference, our own Joe Rickert will also giving a presentation on Wednesday at 2:10PM on Predictive Modeling with Big Data in R which will feature several demos of data mining massive data sets using the Revolution R Enterprise. Incidentally, the whole team Revolution Analytics was proud to receive the Top Innovator award for Big Data Technologies from DeveloperWeek.

If you can't make it to DeveloperWeek, Joe will be also giving a free one-hour webinar on February 14, Introduction to R for Data Mining. If you're new to R and have been thinking about learning the R language, this is a great starting point. I've included the full webinar description below, and you can registering here to secure your seat and to be notified when the replay is available.

Introduction to R for Data Mining

Date:	Thursday, February 14, 2013
Time:	10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time (Click here to see the webinar time in multiple time zones)
Presenter:	Joseph Rickert, Technical Marketing Manager, Revolution Analytics

We at Revolution Analytics are often asked “What is the best way to learn R?” While acknowledging that there may be as many effective learning styles as there are people we have identified three factors that greatly facilitate learning R. For a quick start:

• Find a way of orienting yourself in the open source R world
• Have a definite application area in mind
• Set an initial goal of doing something useful and then build on it

In this webinar, we focus on data mining as the application area and show how anyone with just a basic knowledge of elementary data mining techniques can become immediately productive in R. We will:

• Provide an orientation to R’s data mining resources
• Show how to use the "point and click" open source data mining GUI, rattle, to perform the basic data mining functions of exploring and visualizing data, building classification models on training data sets, and using these models to classify new data.
• Show the simple R commands to accomplish these same tasks without the GUI
• Demonstrate how to build on these fundamental skills to gain further competence in R
• Move away from using small test data sets and show with the same level of skill one could analyze some fairly large data sets with RevoScaleR

Data scientists and analysts using other statistical software as well as students who are new to data mining should come away with a plan for getting started with R.

Revolution Analytics webinars: Introduction to R for Data Mining

Strata's Data Driven Business Day

The tagline for O'Reilly Strata conference series — Making Data Work — has meant that it's always been popular with practitioners, primarily data scientists working with Big Data in real-world environments. Recent Strata events have also attracted more business-oriented attendees, with events focused more on processes and outcomes than on the implementation details. 

On Tuesday February 26, Strata Santa Clara kicks off with Data Driven Business Day (which runs alongside the tutorial track). This series of talks will focus on how to solve business problems with Big Data, and will feature speakers from IBM, Accenture, DDBD and many others. I'm proud to also be included in the lineup: I'll be talking about Real-time Big Data Analytics: From Deployment to Production. This will be an updated, high-level version of my webinar, where I'll focus on defining the buzzwords "big data", "real-time" and "analytics" and how they all fit together. 

If you'd like a preview of what I'll be talking about, check out my conversation with David Pittman at the IBM Big Data Hub. And if you're planning to attend Strata Santa Clara, I look forward to seing you there.

Webinar Jan 24: Using R with Hadoop

In two weeks (on January 24), Think Big Analytics' Jeffrey Breen will present a new webinar on using R with Hadoop. Here's the webinar description:

R and Hadoop are changing the way organizations manage and utilize big data.  Think Big Analytics and Revolution Analytics are helping clients plan, build, test and implement innovative solutions based on the two technologies that allow clients to analyze data in new ways; exposing new insights for the business.  Join us as Jeffrey Breen explains the core technology concepts and illustrates how to utilize R and Revolution Analytics’ RevoR in Hadoop environments. 

Topics include:

• How to use R and Hadoop
• Hadoop streaming
• Various R packages and RHadoop
• Hive via JDBC/ODBC
• Using Revolution’s RHadoop
• Big data warehousing with R and Hive

You can register for the webinar at the link below. If you do plan to attend the live session (where you can ask Jeffrey questions), be sure to sign in early -- we're limited to 1000 participants and there are already more than 1000 registrants. If you can't join the live session (or it's just not at a convenient time for you), signing up will also get you a link to the recorded replay and a download link for the slides as soon as they're available after the webinar.

Revolution Analytics Webinars: Using R with Hadoop

R/Finance 2013: May 17-18 in Chicago

This year's R/Finance conference on applied finance with R is scheduled for May 17-18 in Chicago, and promises once again to be the go-to conference for anyone using R in the finance industry. The keynote speakers have been announced, and it's a great lineup:

• Sanjiv Das, Professor of Finance and Chair of Finance Dept, Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business; Author of Derivatives: Principles and Practice
• Attilio Meucci, Chief Risk Officer at Kepos Capital, LP; Author of Risk and Asset Allocation
• Ryan Sheftel, Managing Director for Electronic Market Making at Credit Suisse
• Ruey Tsay, Professor of Econometrics and Statistics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Author of An Introduction to Analysis of Financial Data with R

 

 

To get a taste of what's to come, you watch a presentation by Sanjiv Das gave in this Revolution Analytics webinar on porfolio risk. Besides the keynotes, one of the things that makes R/Finance special is the diversity of presentations from academics and practitioners using R in industry. If you'd like to be a speaker yourself, the call for papers is open until February 15.

Revolution Analytics is proud to once again to sponsor R/Finance 2013. You can find more information at the conference website linked below.

R/Finance: R/Finance 2013: Applied Finance with R

Upcoming Webinar: Real-time, big-data analytics

A quick heads-up that I'll be presenting another brand-new webinar on Thursday next week (November 29). In Real-time Big Data Analytics: From Deployment to Production, I'll review the process of making predictive models work in real-live operational environments. I'll also tackle those ubiquitous buzz-words "real-time" and "big data", and the fact that they can mean very different things in different parts of the process. Here's the talk description:

Real-time Big Data Analytics: From Deployment to Production

As the Big Data market has evolved, the focus has shifted from data operations (storage, access and processing of data) to data science (understanding, analyzing and forecasting from data). And as new models are developed, organizations need a process for deploying analytics from research into the production environment. In this talk, we'll describe the five stages of real-time analytics deployment:

• Data distillation
• Model development
• Model validation and deployment
• Model refresh
• Real-time model scoring

We'll review the technologies supporting each stage, and how Revolution Analytics software works with the entire analytics stack to bring Big Data analytics to real-time production environments.

I'll be taking live questions at the end of the talk, and you can register your seat at the link below.

Revolution Analytics Webinars: Real-time Big Data Analytics: From Deployment to Production

R User Conference in Spain: Call for Tutorials

I'm really looking forward to useR! 2013 (the international conference for R users), and not just because it's being held in Spain next year (July 10-12). The program is already coming together, with a great lineup of invited speakers, including R-core member Duncan Murdoch and prolific package authoR Hadley Wickham. You too can be part of the program, by presenting a tutorial: 

We invite R users to submit proposals for three hour tutorials on special topics regarding R. The proposals should give a brief description of the tutorial, including goals, detailed outline, justification of why the tutorial is important, background knowledge required and potential attendees. The proposals should be sent before December 15, 2012 to useR-2013_at_R-project.org.

If you'd prefer to give a talk, the call for abstracts will be announced soon.

University of Castilla-La Mancha: The R User Conference 2013

Webinar Thursday: How R is used to optimize tractor production at John Deere

I just sat in on the rehearsal for Thursday's webinar by John Deere's Derek Hoffman, Order Fulfillment Forecasting at John Deere: How R Facilitates Creativity and Flexibility. Derek will give a spirited argument of why R is critical for the farming equipment manufacturer's operations: from forecasting demand for equipment, forecasting crop yields (they produce forecasts for more than half the world's food supply), to optimizing the build order on the production line that produces the tractors. Derek, the longest-serving statistician at John Deere, will share how R is used for logistic regression time series modeling, and geospatial analysis in a reliable — and above all, reproducibe — way, and how the results are integrated with Excel and SAP. He'll wrap up with some thoughts on the "Big Data" hype cycle, the impact that professional statisticians will have in the future.

It's going to be a great presentation, don't miss it. It's at 11AM Pacific time this Thursday, and you can register at the link below.

Revolution Analytics webinars: Order Fulfillment Forecasting at John Deere: How R Facilitates Creativity and Flexibility