Program > Invited Talks

Monday, August 23: Eric Haseltine

Title: User-Centered Design for KDD

Abstract: During initial development, KDD solutions often focus heavily on algorithms, architectures, software, hardware, and systems engineering challenges, without first thoroughly exploring how end-users will employ the new KDD technology. As a result of such "system-centered" design, many useless features are implemented that prolong development and significantly add to life cycle cost, while making the system hard to operate and use. This presentation will describe an alternate "user-centered" approach -- borrowed from the consumer products industry -- that can produce KDD solutions with shorter development cycles, lower costs, and much better usability.

Bio: Eric Haseltine is Director of Research at NSA, where he oversees development of new solutions both for Signals Intelligence and Information Assurance. Prior to joining NSA in 2002, Dr. Haseltine was Executive Vice President of Walt Disney Imagineering, in charge of Research and Development for all of the Walt Disney Company. He came to Disney after a 13 year career at Hughes Aircraft. He earned a PhD in Physiological Psychology at Indiana University, after which he completed a Post Doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt Medical School in Neuroanatomy before joining Hughes. He has 12 patents, and over 100 publications in science and technical journals, the web, and Discover Magazine.

Tuesday, August 24: David Heckerman

Title: Graphical Models for Data Mining

Abstract: I will discuss the use of graphical models for data mining. I will review key research areas including structure learning, variational methods, a relational modeling, and describe applications ranging from web traffic analysis to AIDS vaccine design.

Bio: David Heckerman is founder and manager of the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Group at Microsoft Research. Since 1992, he has been a Senior Researcher at Microsoft, where he has created applications including data-mining tools in SQL Server and Commerce Server, the junk-mail filter in Outlook, Hotmail, and MSN, handwriting recognition in the Tablet PC, text mining software in Sharepoint Portal Server, troubleshooters in Windows, and the Answer Wizard in Office. David received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Stanford University and is a AAAI Fellow.