Behind-the-scenes data mining
George H. John · ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter · 1999
Successful technology becomes invisible. Few people think much about internal combustion engines while they drive to work in three-thousand-pound hunks of metal powered by them, or electricity while it enables countless parts of their modern lives. Data mining has a long way to go before it succeeds in this way -- or does it? At KDD-98, the Behind-the-Scenes Data Mining panel presented five views on this aspect of the success of data mining. George H. John, Data Mining Guru at E.piphany, moderated the panel which included Usama Fayyad, Senior Researcher at Microsoft; Elliot Fishman, Director of Product Management at DoubleClick; Gerald Fahner, Project Analyst at Fair Isaac & Co.; and Paul DuBose, CTO of Analytika. The story below is a fictional amalgam of their presentations, seen from the viewpoint of an average citizen -- a day in the life of John Q. Record.