Dear colleagues,
We are hoping that you are already a registered member of the INFORMS Data Mining Section-which is already the world's largest special interest group for the business schools and IEs within the field of data mining/data science/data analytics/machine learning. You might know this is the sexiest job of the 21st century according to Tom Davenport and D.J. Patil's article at Harvard Business Review.
I wanted to give you some updates about our Data Mining Section's 2018 success and invite you to join this group and also to our Annual Business Meeting on Monday, November 5th at the Convention Center – West 101B at 6.30 pm to network with a huge body of researchers in your field and to hear more in detail about our section's achievements...
Here is some of our good news to share from 2018:
We, as the INFORMS Data Mining Section Council, have reached more than enough registered members as of this semester and hence we're filing an application to become a society in a few weeks. Moreover, our section has doubled the outreach of its prolonged activities, some performance metrics are even tripled. To exemplify, the 13th Workshop on Data Mining & Decision Analytics (DMDA) has attracted more than 70 papers this year and also number of registered participants for this workshop have reached 100s. In line with this, the sponsorship funding for the workshop has reached $4,500 in total. These are all records broken compared to the past 12 years of DMDA workshops. In a similar vein, the number of regular paper sessions has broken a record of 74 this year. The best paper award competition has also substantially raised the submissions this year to 60 papers. Not only quantity but also the quality of submissions for all of these activities have dramatically increased as well. As a result, the financial stability of the section is also noteworthy and total fund balance has significantly boosted to $20K (+150% compared to last year). We as the Data Mining Council also collectively contributed to the ongoing discussions for the new journal proposal, i.e. INFORMS Journal on Data Science. Our council developed and voted on a list of candidates for editor-in-chief and editorial review board members for this journal and sent the list to the journal development team.
I'd like to emphasize that these are all due to the well-established teamwork our council has devised through 2018 via our regular monthly online meetings even during summer, which is a brand new practice for our section. We are hoping that this turns out to be the norm in the years to come. All DM council members have worked tirelessly and harmoniously, which brought us all these achievements. I am copying our Data Mining Council for your reference and to recognize their much hard work this year: https://connect.informs.org/data-mining/about-us/officers
Considering all above, hope you join this active family of researchers and contribute as much as you can!
Also, please encourage your colleagues and/or grad students to be a member of this section as they are now renewing their memberships for 2019. It is only $10 per year to add Data Mining as your section and it will definitely pay off!
With warm regards,
Asil Oztekin, Chair of INFORMS Data Mining Section