UTAR NEWS

UTAR, MMU Host Conference on High-Impact Technology

Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) and  Multimedia University (MMU) jointly hosted the 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD),  the first PAKDD in Malaysia, which kicked off at a renowned hotel in Kuala Lumpur on 29 May 2012.

Spanning three days from 29 May - 1 June 2012, the conference featured three keynote addresses by world-renowned data mining experts, HP Senior Fellow Chandrakant D Patel, Professor Dr Charles Elkan from the University of California at San Diego, and Professor Dr Ian Witten from the University of Waikato.

The conference covered the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), which is fast becoming the tool of choice for world-class business leaders for the purposes of business decision support, customer relationship management as well as business development. KDD uses statistical, mathematical and IT methods to discover knowledge that is otherwise obscured in databases.

The Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) is one of the longest established and leading international series of conferences in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery.  It serves as an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their latest developments, new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all related areas such as data mining, statistical and symbolic machine learning, databases, knowledge acquisition and automatic scientific discovery, data visualization, and knowledge-based systems.

"The choice of Malaysia as the host for PAKDD this year is a strong indication that the KDD community in the region recognises that their Malaysian peers are progressing actively in this area," said this year's Conference Co-Chair Professor Dr Ewe Hong Tat, Vice President (Internationalisation and Academic Development) of Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman.

Conference Program Co-Chair Associate Professor Dr. Ho Chin Kuan, Dean of Faculty of Computing and Informatics at Multimedia University, expressed his excitement about PAKDD 2012 being hosted in Kuala Lumpur. "KDD is an extremely useful tool that allows businesses to discover new knowledge that is currently hidden in their databases," he said. "It allows them to discover, among other things, the buying patterns of their customers, who their best customers are, and many other interesting patterns. The conference will provide a good opportunity for local data professionals to acquire cutting-edge knowledge in the field through the conference talks, tutorials and workshops, and to network and interact productively with the foreign participants."

The other two conference co-chairs of the PAKDD 2012 were Professor Dr Philip S Yu, Professor and Wexler Chair in Information Technology, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA and Professor Dr Lim Ee Peng, Professor of Information Systems and Director of Living Analytics Research Centre, Singapore Management University, Singapore. The other two program co-chairs of PAKDD 2012 are Associate Professor Dr. Pang-Ning Tan of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, USA and Professor Dr. Sanjay Chawla of the School of Information Technology, the University of Sydney, Australia.

The three sponsors of the conference were Telekom Malaysia Berhad, the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development, the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research; and leader in business analytics software, SAS.  It is supported by Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) and National ICT Association of Malaysia (PIKOM).

PAKDD had its inaugural debut in Singapore in 1997, and since then it has been hosted annually in various cities in the region before coming this year to Kuala Lumpur for the first time.  The 16th PAKDD in Kuala Lumpur will be held from 29 May to 1 June 2012.  Besides Singapore, which also hosted the conference again in 2006, the other cities were Shenzhen (2011), Hyderabad (2010), Bangkok (2009), Osaka (2008), Nanjing (2007), Hanoi (2005), Sydney (2004), Seoul (2003), Taipei (2002), Hong Kong (2001), Kyoto (2000), Beijing (1999), and Melbourne (1998).

In addition to the main conference, there were four workshops, three tutorials, and a doctoral symposium. The proceedings of the conference will be published by leading international publisher Springer under the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. In conjunction with this, a data mining competition with two different categories was also organised. The Open Category of the competition challenged participants to predict churn and win-backs in the telecommunication industry. The Student Category required students to use SAS data mining software to identify the correlation between the number of job applications and Malaysia's economic indicators. The data for the student category were provided by JobStreet while the student category prizes were sponsored by SAS Malaysia.

As a respite to the intense and intellectually demanding sessions, PAKDD participants got to enjoy several social activities such as a welcome reception on the first day, a conference banquet on the second day, and a city tour to conclude the event on the third day.  The conference attracted over 150 participants from more than 30 countries.