100 interesting datasets

I got this link from my colleague Zach Nation: 100 interesting datasets.

O'Reilly visit in Israel

A couple of weeks ago I enjoyed hosting O'Reilly guys (and girl) in Israel. Here is a venturebeat article which covers this visit. The participants were Ben Lorica (chief scientist), Roger Magoulas (director of research) and Gina Blabler (VP conferences).

O'Reilly team came to examine the Israeli high tech scene. We are interested in promoting an Israeli Strata conference in Israel and already assembled a few companies who would like to support this effort. Anyone interested in helping promote this is welcome to connect.

Polychart: front end visualization of mysql data

I got this from my colleague Eric Wolfe. Another interesting attempt to make data science easier: Polychart has a UI which allows drag and drop plotting of mysql data tables. The drawback is that you basically need to know what you are looking for - but still an interesting attempt to make data drilling easier. 

Pacific Northwest National Lab uses GraphLab for its Cyber Security Project

Just got a nice visualization from PNNL researcher Sutanay Choundhury. It uses GraphLab spectral clustering to cluster different nodes in a network. And here is a paragraph about the meaning of the graphs:
The input graph was partitioned using the spectral clustering implementation in GraphLab. The size of the nodes in the rendered graph is determined by a cost function. In this visualization, the cost function simply returns the degree of the node, although one may envision using centrality or other non-graph theoretic metric of importance. We used a threshold k (20 in this case), to display at most k nodes with highest costs in a cluster. The goal of the visualization was to provide a capability to see the distribution of "important" nodes across the clusters.

The above effort is a part from a larger project. Pacific Northwest National Lab, USA has a cyber security related project which uses GraphLab, among other tools. The project is called M&Ms4Graphs: multi-scale, multi-dimensional graph analytics for cyber security. Anyone who is interested in learning more about it, is welcome to attend our 3rd GraphLab conference, where Sutanay will give a demo.

2nd Large Scale Recommender Systems Workshop

We just announced our 2nd Large Scale Recommender System Workshop (LSRS 2014), to take place jointly with RecSys 2014. The workshop organizing committee is Tao Ye from Pandra, Qiang Yan from Taobao and your humble servant.

Last year, our workshop attracted the largest audience in RecSys.

Anyway who is working on large scale recommender systems is encouraged to submit an abstract or slides which describe their work. Submission date is July 21, 2014.

1st Workshop on TV Recommendations

I am glad to announce that together with Comcast & Boxfish we are organizing the 1st workshop on TV recommendations, joint with ACM Recommender System conference.

We encourage researchers in this area to submit their papers - submission date is July 21, 2014.

The weirdest startup I found so far

Is intelescope: they literally count the number of trees in a forest based on aerial imagery.
A truly random forest!

Graph analytics for ship tracking

Just saw this super cool demo of Windward, an Aleph VC company.
Windward analyzes satellite imagery and other sources of information to track ships at sea and find anomalous behavior.

Neo4j video talk: case studies for graph analytics in finance

The Five Graphs of Finance - Philip Rathle @ GraphConnect NY 2013 from Neo Technology on Vimeo.

Anyone who wants to learn more about graph analytics use cases should attend our 3rd GraphLab Conference, where neo4j will also present a demo.

Credit to my collaborator Joey Gonzalez.