Report ICDM'2009
Comments from Participants of ICDM
My name is Warwick Graco and I am a senior director in the Australian Taxation Office responsible for embedding analytical solutions in the business of the organization.
I am a data miner and modeller by profession and have many years experience developing and deploying models.
I am also on the board of our data-mining professional association in Australia called the Institute of Analytics Professionals Australia'.
I attended ICDM 2009 for the first time. I will be honest and state that I did not know
what to expect other than I was keen to learn from the experiences of others developing
and deploying models. I was surprised in many ways by the conference. The first was it was
held a beautiful regional city called 'Leipzig' in Germany. This city has a rich history of
famous musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach and famous scientists such as Werner von
Heisenberg. The second was the conference had very much an international audience with
attendees coming from different parts of Germany as well as Europe, North America,
South America, Middle East, Asia and Australia. The third was the topics covered were very
diverse and also applied in their emphasis. The papers covered forensics, medicine,
agriculture, telecommunications, engineering, marketing and finance. There were also papers
on theoretical aspects of data mining and mining using multi-media sources. All papers were
of a high standard. The most intriguing papers for me were the use of an electronic nose to
diagnose cancer, one on protecting the identity of subjects when data matching and a few on
facial and hand-writing recognition.
I intend encouraging my colleagues who work in industry and commerce in Australia to submit papers to this conference. I will emphasise that this is a forum for meeting other practicing professionals who are involved in using data mining for real-world problems. I look forward to attending next year's ICDM in Berlin.
Warwick Graco
Senior Director Operational Analytics
Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer
ATO
Civic ACT 2600, Australia