Announcing a new event for Melbourne's chapter of the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia

When: Wednesday September 1st, 2010 at 6:00pm
Registration - 5.30pm onwards
Welcome and introduction - 6pm
Andrew Condron - 6.10pm
Discussion, Q&A with Andrew - 6.40pm
Networking over food & drinks - 7pm
Close - 8pm
Where: Cliftons, Level 1, 440 Collins Street, Melbourne 3000

We are holding our next Melbourne IAPA Forum at 6PM on Wednesday 1st of September at Cliftons with a special guest speaker Andrew Condron, the Head of Customer Insights and Analytics at ANZ Bank.

Brief Bio:

Andrew is Head of Customer Insight and Analytics at ANZ. In this role, Andrew is responsible for leading the customer analytics, business intelligence and customer contact management functions that support ANZ's Retail, Commercial, and Wealth segments.

Andrew has been at ANZ for more than 10 years, working primarily across MIS, Analytics and Database Marketing, but also including four years in Operations and Sales Management in ANZ's Esanda Finance division. Prior to joining ANZ, Andrew worked in the UK in credit scoring consultancy and prior to that, GE Capital Australia & Pacific Micromarketing. Andrew holds a Bachelor of Science (majoring in Statistics & Mathematics) with Honours in Mathematics from Latrobe University, and an MBA from Melbourne Business School.

Discussion Topic: "Keys to enabling business goals through Enterprise Analytics"

Abstract:

Customer Analytics Departments in both large and small enterprises often undertake well meaning activities, churning through volumes of historical data, and discovering valuable insights.  However, very often, this activity is not aligned with the current direction or mission of the enterprise and goes unnoticed or unappreciated. In this enlightening presentation Andrew will outline how his analytics background and the knowledge gained during overseas management assignments and understandings captured during his MBA have helped bring vision, alignment and execution into synch.

Registration:

Registration for this event is a MUST, as space will be limited!
Please RSVP to rsvp@iapa.org.au to register for the event.

Time:

We encourage all attendees to arrive for registration from 5.30 to 5:45PM.

Food & drinks will be provided following the event as we encourage discussion and networking amongst old and new members.

We look forward to welcoming you on the night!

Rob Beck and Shane Butler

Announcing a new event for Sydney's chapter of the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia!

When: Tuesday August 10 at 6:00pm
Registration - 5.30pm onwards
IAPA opening from new NSW Chapter Head - 6pm
Michael Berry - 6.10pm
Discussion, Q&A with Michael - 6.40pm
Networking over food & drinks - 7pm
Close - 8pm
Where: Cliftons, 190 - 200 George Street, Sydney

Hi Everyone,

We are holding our next event at 6PM on Tuesday 10th of August at Cliftons in Sydney with International guest speaker Michael Berry, Principal of Data Miners Inc. and author of Mastering Data Mining, Mining the Web, and Data Mining Techniques for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management.


Brief Bio:

Michael Berry, together with his colleague, Gordon Linoff, has authored some of the most widely read and respected books on data mining. These best sellers in the field have been translated into many languages. Michael is an active practitioner of data mining.  His books reflect many years of practical, hands-on experience down in the data mines. A data mining educator as well as a consultant,  Michael is in demand as a keynote speaker and seminar leader in the area of data mining generally and the application of data mining to customer relationship management in particular.  Michael is also an adjunct professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College where he teaches Marketing Analytics.

Prior to founding Data Miners in December, 1997, Michael spent 8 years at Thinking Machines Corporation.  There he specialised in the application of massively parallel supercomputing techniques to business and marketing applications, including one of the largest database marketing systems of the time.  He believes that to understand data, one has to be close to the business that generated it and to the people who make use of it so he is happy to travel to client locations around the world.


Discussion Topic: Experiences from the field

Abstract:

It is often said that you can only manage what you can measure. An unfortunate corollary is that managers tend to only manage whatever happens to be measured.  This talk discusses several common ways of making wrong decisions based on perfectly good analysis of the wrong data. A case study describes metrics used to measure the effectiveness of a recommendation system for web retailers and the unfortunate consequences of choosing the wrong one.


Registration:

Registration for this event is a MUST, as space will be limited!
Please RSVP to rsvp@iapa.org.au to register for the event.

Time:

We encourage all attendees to arrive for registration from 5.30 to 5:45PM. If you have trouble getting in on the night please call Michael Loop, IAPA NSW Chapter Head on 0410 159 085.

Food & drinks will be provided following the event as we encourage discussion and networking amongst old and new members.

I look forward to welcoming you on the night!

Michael Loop

SAS announces Michael Berry in Australia in August

SAS Education are pleased to announce the world renowned thought leader in Data Mining, Michael Berry, will be coming to Australia to conduct a training course and to present at SAS Forum 2010 in August 2010.

Michael Berry, together with his colleague, Gordon Linoff, has authored some of the most widely read and respected books on data mining. These best sellers in the field have been translated into many languages. Michael is an active practitioner of data mining.  His books reflect many years of practical, hands-on experience down in the data mines.  A data mining educator as well as a consultant, Michael is in demand as a keynote speaker and seminar leader in the area of data mining generally and the application of data mining to customer relationship management in particular. 

Prior to founding Data Miners in December, 1997, Michael spent 8 years at Thinking Machines Corporation.  There he specialised in the application of massively parallel supercomputing techniques to business and marketing applications, including one of the largest database marketing systems of the time.  He believes that to understand data, one has to be close to the business that generated it and to the people who make use of it so he is happy to travel to client locations around the world.

Michael will be conducting a Data Mining Theory and Practice course in Sydney

Date:  9-11 August, 2010
Time:  9am - 5pm
Location:  Cliftons, George St, Sydney
Price:  $3,500 + GST per person

Registration: http://www.sasforum.com/anz/  -  Follow the link to Registration within the SAS Forum home page; this will enable you to book the pre-Forum courses (of which this is one; Michael is also presenting at SAS Forum). Attendees at Michael's course will receive complimentary passes to attend SAS Forum ANZ, which takes place at the Sydney Hilton hotel on Thursday 12 August.

This course introduces a data mining methodology that is a superset to the SAS SEMMA methodology around which SAS Enterprise Miner is organised.  The course also introduces a wide range of data mining algorithms and both theoretical knowledge and practical skills.  In this class, you work through all the steps of a data mining project, beginning with problem definition and data selection, and continuing through data exploration, data transformation, sampling, portioning, modeling, and assessment.


Learn how to:

use a data mining methodology

build and use decision trees and neural networks for modeling and scoring

use survival analysis and create survival curves.

Who should attend?
Business analysts, their managers, and statisticians

Detailed Course Outline

• Introduction to Data Mining
• what is data mining?
• directed and undirected data mining
• models
• profiling and prediction

Data Mining Methodology

• why have a methodology?
• how data miners can inadvertently learn things that are not true
• translating business problems into data mining problems
• the importance of model stability
• finding the right input variables
• sampling to create balanced model sets
• partitioning to create training, validation, and test sets
• Data preparation
• model assessment

Data Exploration

• developing intuition about data
• data structure
• data types
• data values
• exploring distributions
• summary statistics
• histograms
• using SAS Enterprise Miner for data exploration

Regression Models

• the null hypothesis
• statistical significance
• confidence bounds
• variance and standard deviation
• standardized values

Correlation

• linear regression
• logistic regression
• using SAS Enterprise Miner to build regression models

Decision Trees

• decision trees as data exploration and classification tools
• decision trees for modeling and scoring
• decision trees for variable selection
• alternate representations of decision trees
• algorithms used to build decision trees
• splitting criteria
• recognizing instability and overfitting in decision tree models
• capturing interactions between variables
• using SAS Enterprise Miner to build decision trees

Neural Networks

• origins of neural networks
• neural networks compared with regression
• algorithms used to train neural networks
• data preparation requirements for neural networks
• picking appropriate inputs for neural networks
• creating neural network models using SAS Enterprise Miner

Memory-Based Reasoning

• similarity and distance
• distance metrics appropriate for different kinds of data
• the role of the training set in memory-based reasoning (MBR)
• combining the votes of several neighbors
• other K-nearest neighbor techniques
• collaborative filtering
• using the SAS Enterprise Miner MBR node

Clustering

• more on similarity and distance
• the k-means algorithm
• divisive clustering
• agglomerative clustering
• data preparation for clustering
• interpreting clusters
• finding clusters with SAS Enterprise Miner
  
  
• Survival Analysis
  
• origins of survival analysis
• how business data is different from clinical data
• hazards and hazard charts
• Retention curves and survival curves
• calculating survival from retention
• calculating hazards empirically
• parametric hazard models
• censoring
• competing risks
• survival-based forecasting
• using SAS code in SAS Enterprise Miner to create survival curves

Association Rules

Link Analysis

• background on graph theory
• sphere of influence
• using link analysis to generate derived variables
• graph-coloring algorithm
• Kleinberg's algorithm
• Genetic Algorithms
• optimization techniques and problems (SAS/OR software)
• other algorithms
• linear programming problems
• genetic algorithms

SAS Forum 2010 is the premier business analytics event in the region. It presents an unparalleled opportunity for business leaders, decision makers, managers and SAS professionals to explore how value and performance are driven from organisational insights.

Attendees can choose from a comprehensive agenda of over 50 high value presentations and workshops. Expert panels and detailed case studies will cover a wide range of industry, business, and technology issues including risk & compliance, customer management, performance management and business analytics.

On the day, over 1,000 industry, Government and IT executives, managers and professionals will collectively explore how insights from business analytics lead to superior business performance.

http://www.sasforum.com/anz/

IAPA are pleased to announce IBM as our second Principal Sponsor (Greenplum being the first). Through the launch of their Business Analytics and Optimisation practice in 2009 and significant software investments in Cognos and SPSS, IBM are continuing to invest in the Analytics industry.
IBM will be providing IAPA with hosting facilities for Chapter meetings in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra from June 2010 onwards.

An event of particular relevance for IAPA members is on this week in both Sydney (Wed 9 June) and Melbourne (Thurs 10 June), IBM's Insight 2010.

To open Insight 2010, keynote speakers Phil Ruthven, IBISWorld Chairman and one of Australia's most respected economic commentators and Mark Register, Vice President of IBM Information on Demand, Asia Pacific will be sharing their insights on the future directions of information and analytics.

Following the keynotes will be a customer panel discussion.

Attendees can then tailor the agenda from a range of sessions designed for both analytics and information management specialists such as business analytics, business intelligence and data warehousing, data/content management and analytics, information integration, master data management and performance management.  For full details and how to Register, please see the attached pdf invitation.

(See attached file: Insight2010.pdf)

18 - 19 May 2010, Rydges World Square, Sydney
www.fraudriskman.com

The Fraud Risk Management conference will be a case-study driven and cross-industry conference, to assist fraud and risk professionals from corporations and Government to address timely  issues relating to bothinternal and external fraud. Pre and post workshops will be held on May 17th & 21st. IAPA members receive a 10% discount.

The event will be attended by Fraud and Risk executives across industries and Government, and topics to be covered will include the following:

- Financial fraud
- Identity fraud
- Online fraud & e-crime
- Forensics
- Global and local trends
- Supply chain and Contractor issues
- Analytics, reporting, and auditing
- Credit card & merchant risk
- Data analytics
- In-house investigative techniques & forensics
        - for customer fraud
        - for staff/internal fraud
- Organisation-wide risk assurance
- Mitigation, detection, management, recovery
- Information security risks
- Opportunistic fraud
- Forecasting & quantifying potential losses
- Fraud risk training & awareness
- Digital payment fraud

IAPA members receive a 10% discount.

Speakers include:

Brett Small, Head of Fraud Risk
National Australia Bank

Caroline Pearce - Head of Fraud, Risk and Compliance
Australian Payments and Clearing Association

Russell Mills, National Fraud & Investigations Manager - Legal & Compliance
- Australian Operations,
QBE Australia

Tim Kitching, Head of Risk and Compliance Advice - Marketing and Insurance
Risk Management,
MLC and NAB Wealth

Glenn Hovey, Revenue Assurance Manager
Macquarie Telecom

Keith Joyce, Benefits Risk Manager,
Medibank Private

Paul Curwell, Manager - Risk Management,
Tower Australia

Stephen McCombie, Lecturer,
Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, Macquarie
University

Joseph Vukasovic,
MasterCard

Gary Gill, Partner
KPMG Forensic

IAPA Sydney Forum

Following a great presentation at the recent IAPA Melbourne forum, the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA) welcomes Antony Ugoni for this month's Sydney Forum.  Antony is Team Leader, Customer Analytics at the National Australia Bank. He has agreed to give our members an insight into analytical marketing at NAB.  Entitled `Making Sure Your Insight Is Insightful', Antony will take us on a journey, highlighting some of the key changes in culture, tools and approach that are helping NAB compete at the highest level in terms of turning leads into sales.

Details

Date: Tuesday 11th August 2009
Times:
From 6pm - Registration and networking
6.15pm - Welcome by the Head of the NSW  Chapter
6.20pm - NAB Presentation and Questions
7pm - 8pm-  Networking over drinks and canapés
Venue: Deloitte offices - Level 9, 225 George Street, Sydney

RSVP :  rsvp@iapa.org.au
This will be a popular event so please register early to ensure a seat.

Background on Antony

Antony has been working within analytical environments since 1992.

His career began in epidemiological surroundings and worked as a Biostatistician to the Alfred Group of Hospitals jointly with Monash Medical School between 1992 and 1994, and then as a lecturer in Biostatistics at the University of Melbourne between 1995 and 2000.

Antony still provides statistical support and advice to this industry today, and is a co-author on more than 50 peer reviewed articles in medical research. During his time in academia, Antony also consulted to a range of other industries including Finance, Agriculture, Civic Planning, Gaming, Telecommunications and Tourism.

In 2000, Antony joined the National Australia Bank to lead its Credit Card Fraud Analytics Group (the first of its kind in Australia) and over the following 3 years, through the use of data driven insight, assisted in the reduction of fraud losses of more than 50% in an environment where industry losses were growing at a rate of 30% per annum.

In 2003, Antony moved over to the NAB's analytical marketing group (National Leads) and was given the opportunity to lead the Customer Analytics team soon after, and continues in this capacity today.

Antony holds an MSc from LaTrobe University and is an Associate at the School of Physiotherapy, University of Melbourne.

The Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA) welcomes Antony Ugoni for this month's Melbourne Forum.

Antony is Team Leader, Customer Analytics at the National Australia Bank. He has agreed to give our members an insight into analytical marketing at NAB.  Entitled `Making Sure Your Insight Is Insightful', Antony will take us on a journey, highlighting some of the key changes in culture, tools and approach that are helping NAB compete at the highest level in terms of turning leads into sales.

*** Note:  The Forum will take place at Cliftons at 440 Collins Street (whilst Deloitte are moving offices) ***

Details

Date: Wednesday 17 June 2009

Times:

From 5.30pm - Registration and networking
6pm - Welcome by the Head of the Victorian Chapter
6.10pm - A word from IAPA's new Principal Sponsor, Greenplum
6.15pm - NAB Presentation and Questions
7pm - 8pm-  Networking over drinks and canapés
Venue: Cliftons, 440 Collins Street, Melbourne

RSVP :  rsvp@iapa.org.au
This will be a popular event so please register early to ensure a seat.

Background on Antony

Antony has been working within analytical environments since 1992.

His career began in epidemiological surroundings and worked as a Biostatistician to the Alfred Group of Hospitals jointly with Monash Medical School between 1992 and 1994, and then as a lecturer in Biostatistics at the University of Melbourne between 1995 and 2000. Antony still provides statistical support and advice to this industry today, and is a co-author on more than 50 peer reviewed articles in medical research. During his time in academia, Antony also consulted to a range of other industries including Finance, Agriculture, Civic Planning, Gaming, Telecommunications and Tourism.

In 2000, Antony joined the National Australia Bank to lead its Credit Card Fraud Analytics Group (the first of its kind in Australia) and over the following 3 years, through the use of data driven insight, assisted in the reduction of fraud losses of more than 50% in an environment where industry losses were growing at a rate of 30% per annum.

In 2003, Antony moved over to the NAB's analytical marketing group (National Leads) and was given the opportunity to lead the Customer Analytics team soon after, and continues in this capacity today.

Antony holds an MSc from LaTrobe University and is an Associate at the School of Physiotherapy, University of Melbourne.

The Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA) is pleased to announce the next Sydney Forum. The new Head of the NSW Chapter will be introducing the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) who are recognised as leaders in the credit and risk management field. Three senior members of CBA's Risk team will jointly present a case study on techniques and strategies CBA apply to effectively manage this business unit.

Details
Date: Monday 27 April 2009

Time:

• From 5.30pm - Registration
• 6pm - IAPA update from the Chair
  • Update on Membership, Website and introduction of new Principal Sponsor
  • Welcome to the new Head of the NSW Chapter, Carlie Smee
• 6.15pm - CBA presentation, followed by Q&A
• 7pm - 8pm-  Networking over drinks and canapés

Venue: Deloitte, L9, 225 George Street, Sydney

RSVP :  rsvp@iapa.org.au

This will be a popular event so please register early to ensure a seat.

Not a Member? Please register at http://www.iapa.org.au/?page=memberSignup

Speaker details:

Jonathan Passlow joined CBA in 2004, running reporting and originations for personal loans and now credit cards. During this time, Jonathan has optimised origination strategies for both credit cards and personal loans, implemented the monitoring of credit risk factors, as well as playing a key role in the development of contribution modelling.

Andrew Fairthorne was recruited as a Senior Analyst in CBA's credit card account management unit. Having joined CBA in 2007 Andrew has played an important role in driving the optimisation of the credit card authorisation system, which has contributed to improved credit risk assessment at a transactional level, and also enhanced customer service at point of sale. Prior to CBA, Andrew was a quantitative analyst with the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations.

Paul Fishburn joined CBA in 2006 to manage cards collections strategy for CBA. During this time, Paul has represented credit risk in the collections transformation project and developed collections strategies that piloted new contact channels. Prior to CBA Paul was based in the UK working for Marks & Spencer Financial Services (UK) in credit card account management. 

The Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA) are privileged to have an internationally renowned speaker for this month's Melbourne Forum. Tony Woods is in Australia providing training and advice to Australian Industry on the topic of how to best leverage analytics. Tony has agreed to address our members in an open discussion and will provide an entertaining and insightful discussion as to his extensive experience in Analytic Advisory services.

Details

Date: Wednesday 25 February 2009
Times:

1. From 5.30pm - Registration
2. 6pm - Welcome by the new Head of the Victorian Chapter
3. 6.10pm - Presentation and interactive discussion
4. 7pm - 8pm- Networking over drinks and canapés

Venue: Deloitte, L14, 180 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
RSVP : melbourne@iapa.org.au
This will be a popular event so please register early to ensure a seat.

Tony's consultancy clients in the commercial arena have included:

From Retail

• Marks & Spencer (where he supported the development of the analytic function of the new
  Customer Insight Unit and oversaw the first behavioural segmentation of Marks & Spencer customers
• Great Universal Stores (Direct Retail)
• Waitrose
• Somerfields

Financial Services

• Norwich Union (Insurance)
• M&G (Investment)
• LloydsTSB
• Royal Bank of Scotland

Telecommunications

• Orange
• Vodafone
• Yell (B-to-B)

FMCG and Pharmaceutical

• Gillette
• Johnson-Matthey
• Procter & Gamble
• Mars

Tony Woods has been a statistician and analyst for some 35 years. The first third of his career was spent as an academic statistician in Oxford, Mexico, London and Reading. During that time he carried out numerous consultancy engagements for International Aid organisations overseas (including WHO and FAO) and was a consultant to manufacturing companies in the UK. In the mid-80s he left the academic sector to set up as an independent consultant. Although he continued his previous activities, Tony also moved into applications in credit management, direct marketing and retail logistics.

In 1992 he was one of the founding partners of Statistics Applications (www.statapp.co.uk) in order to offer a new type of training to business modellers, marketing analysts and credit analysts: training which focuses on the effective application of analytic tools to the solution of commercial problems.

The abstract for Tony's talk:

Trials, Tribulations and the Fun in a Long Life as a Statistical Consultant
This is about statistics as a problem-solving discipline; statistics as a support to other professionals. I have spent my life trying to make statistics useful; trying to make it accessible to the non-statistician. Why should that be so difficult?

The examples discussed here will range from designing the first surveillance surveys for HIV in Africa, through monitoring of subsistence farming projects in South America, selecting a sample of households using a Coca Cola bottle, development of the perfect plastic bottle, design of a nuclear reprocessing plant, quality control of shaving foam aerosols, salmonella in chocolate, segmentation of a retail customer base, saving millions of pounds worth of wastage in a food retail chain, .... Mostly this will be about how it felt: what made it hard and what made it worthwhile.

Not a Member? Please register at http://www.iapa.org.au/?page=memberSignup

30th October 2008 - Melbourne IAPA Forum hosted by Deloitte

The Institute of Analytic Professionals of Australia (IAPA) invite you to attend the next Analytic Forum being sponsored and hosted by Deloitte at its Melbourne offices NEXT Thursday 30th October.

Title: Experiences in text mining - from help-desk response generation to the detection of customer satisfaction

Presenters: Yuval Muram and Ingrid Zukerman
Analytics Manager at GAPBuster and Professor of Computer Science, Monash University respectively

Yuval and Ingrid will discuss their experience of analysing email enquiries to a customer help-desk to automate tailored responses.  They will also discuss analysis of free-form comments from Customer Satisfaction and Mystery Shopping to report on the more emotional aspect of the customer experience that is not reflected by structured data, and to assist in the design of future surveys.  Monash and GAPBuster have also been successful in gaining a Linkage Grant to fund their work on Sentiment detection to identify customer opinions from combining textual feedback with quantitative information.
Please RSVP to rsvp@iapa.org.au
 
Date: Thursday 30th October
Time: Registration from 5.30pm, presentation starts at 6pm, networking from 7pm
Location: Deloitte, Level 14, 180 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne

Not a Member?  Please register at http://www.iapa.org.au/?page=memberSignup

IAPA Sydney Forum - 25th July 2007

Recently, the ATO's Analytics community of practice, in conjunction with the Institute of Analytics Professionals and the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers offered a presentation in Canberra by Anthony Nolan OAM titled "Identifying Entity Compliance Behaviour using Movement Permissions and Financial data - A links mapping and Analytics Approach"
The presentation was well-attended with over 60 participants, from over nine different government departments and from private industry.

There have been requests to re-run the presentation interstate, as well as many requests for copies of the presentation. The main part of the presentation discussed some of the practical ways of extracting data, analysing, and mapping results through using linkage charts. One of the more interesting aspects was how by using Binning and Dendrograms (Visual Clustering) you can take a wide range of variables from complex situations and by individualising the relevant entity specific factors with using outlier analysis, to produce profiles, risking ratings and case selection.

Tuesday, 12th June 2007

Salford Systems would like to invite you to attend a cocktail party on Tuesday 12th June 2007, at Customs House, Circular Quay Sydney from 5pm. The evening will include a presentation by Dr. Dan Steinberg, the CEO of Salford Systems, on "The Latest Developments in Predictive Modelling and Data Mining". The presentation will discuss innovative tools for assessing models, extensive modeling automation, methods for uncovering "hotspots" - segments of extraordinarily high value or risk. This will be of particular interest for CRM modellers, fraud and risk analysts, and market researchers. The talk will be followed by drinks and canapés.

Invitations have been sent out to IAPA members and associates in the analytics field. If you would like to attend then please RSVP to rsvp@iapa.org.au

Wednesday 20th December 2006

IAPA held a Christmas function on Wednesday 20th December 2006 in Sydney.

Australasian Data Mining Conference, Sydney 29 and 30 November 2006

The 5th Australasian Data Mining conference (AusDM06) will take place over two days at the end of this month at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

This year's program includes sessions on:

Professional Challenges, Health Data Mining, Industry Data Mining, Text Mining, Algorithms, Financial Data Mining, and Web Mining, and features four keynote speakers from industry.

We received 58 submissions this year, from which 25 were selected for presentation by an international committee following a rigid blind peer-review and ranking process. The cut-off threshold for accepted papers has been higher than in previous years (4.3 in 2006 compared to 4.1 on a 5 point scale in 2005). This indicates the high quality of the submissions.

Costs

Full registration costs for the two day conference are $550 (including GST), and $275 for students.

Details about AusDM06, including the accepted papers and registration details can be found at:

http://ausdm06.togaware.com/

We hope to see you there!

Organisers

The organisation committee is Simeon Simoff (UTS), Graham Williams (ATO), Peter Christen (ANU), Paul Kennedy (UTS) and Jiuyong Li (USQ).

Title
Data Linkage techniques: Past, present and future.

Speaker
Dr. Peter Christen, Department of Computer Science, FEIT The Australian National University, Canberra.

Abstract
Techniques for matching, linking or integrating data are becoming increasingly popular in many organisations. While traditionally used mainly in health and statistics, today data linkage is increasingly being applied in and between government organisations to improve outcomes in taxation, census, immigration, social welfare, in crime and fraud detection, and in the assembly of terrorism intelligence.

Many businesses routinely deduplicate and link their data when compiling mailing lists, and databases containing customer data are commonly sold for marketing purposes.

Today, data linkage not only faces computational and operational challenges due to the increasing size of data collections and their complexity, but also privacy and confidentiality challenges due to growing concerns by the general public about their personal information being linked and shared between organisations.

In this talk Peter will (1) present a short history of data linkage, (2) provide an overview of various innovative linkage techniques that have been developed in the last few years, and (3) discuss the core technical research areas that need to be addressed in order to make large scale data linkage both feasible as well as acceptable by the general public.

Biography

Dr Peter Christen is a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University. He received his Diploma in computer science engineering from the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in 1995 and his PhD in computer science from the University of Basel (Switzerland) in 1999. His research interests are data mining (especially data preprocessing and data linkage), high-performance computing, and most recently security and privacy preservation (in the context of data linkage and health informatics).

In the last four years his research has concentrated on the project "Investigation and Development of Parallel Large Scale Record Linkage Techniques", an ARC Linkage project conducted in collaboration with and partially funded by the NSW Department of Health.

Location

Room G35 Ground Floor John Dedman Building 27 ANU. It is located between the Union Building and the Drill Hall. G35 is on the western side near Sullivans Creek. There is a paid parking area corner of Childers St and Hutton St. This is located near the John Dedman Building on the eastern side.

4th - 6th April 2006

Swinbourne University

The course, which is a 'hands on' introduction to the SAS system, is designed for people with little or no knowledge of the package. It aims to provide participants with sufficient knowledge of the Base SAS module of the SAS system so that they can create and run their own SAS programs.