Profile: KDnuggets Serves Analytics and Big Data Fields
A profile of KDnuggets, including an overview, history, and present highlights, is featured on the homepage of INFORMS, a major society for Analytics and Optimization (until June 23, 2014).
By Gregory Piatetsky,
, Jun 11, 2014.
INFORMS, which stands for The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, is the largest professional society in the field of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics. Recently it has been moving strongly into the field of Analytics, and wants to
unite Operations Research and Analytics.
With over 11,000 members, INFORMS has a significant audience, and so I was very pleased that INFORMS has featured my profile of KDnuggets on its homepage
www.informs.org/, in OR/Analytics at Work Blog (orange box). The profile will be on the homepage from June 9 to 23, 2014,
and the direct link is
Profile: KDnuggets Serves Analytics and Big Data Fields.
Here is the profile, with an overview of KDnuggets present, history, and highlights.
1. Overview
is a popular site covering Business Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science.
KDnuggets is published and edited by
, Ph.D.,
a leading expert in Data Mining and Data Science, Ph.D., a co-founder of KDD conferences, and co-founder and past chair of ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
In 2013 KDnuggets had over 770,000 unique visitors, according to Google Analytics, and 279,000 unique visitors in Q1 2014 (over 100K/month). KDnuggets was recently ranked by Alexa in the top 70K sites globally, top 35K sites in US.
The chart below shows growth of KDnuggets audience, which more than tripled from 2010 to 2014.
KDnuggets
newsletter is emailed 2-3 times a month to all the subscribers.
KDnuggets also has a
Facebook page ,
a LinkedIn group,
and a very popular
@KDnuggets Twitter account.
KDnuggets News, published
since 1993, is a unique mirror of the history and present state of predictive analytics, data mining, and data science field.
All KDnuggets News issues from the very first one are available online at
www.kdnuggets.com/news/archive.html
The most recent posts are at
www.kdnuggets.com/news/
2. History
KDnuggets was started by
in 1993 as a way to
attending the
KDD-93 workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(organized by Gregory and others at AAAI-93 in Washington, DC).
With the appearance of World Wide Web and Mosaic, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and
Chris Matheus have created a website called
Knowledge Discovery Mine hosted at GTE Labs (info.gte.com/~kdd site no longer active), which was at the time
the second site in the world covering data mining and knowledge discovery field.
While Gregory was at GTE Labs, the newsletter was published as
“Knowledge Discovery Nuggets”. It served as an unofficial publication of
KDD workshops (started by Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro in 1989),
and helped them to grow and become conferences.
When Gregory left GTE Labs in 1997, he created KDnuggets site,
with “KDnuggets” standing for Knowledge Discovery nuggets,
(conveying the mission of covering the field with short, concise “nuggets” of useful information),
and moved the Knowledge Discovery Mine to
www.kdnuggets.com
Gregory was working from 1997 to 2000 as a Chief Scientist for Knowledge Stream Partners (KSP), which were providing data mining and customer analytics consulting to major banks and financial institutions, and editing KDnuggets late at night after work.
When Y2K crisis caused most of KSP to freeze any future projects (including any data mining projects), KSP lost most of its revenue and and cut salaries and work hours for all employees, including Gregory. The extra time and reduced salary motivated Gregory to put the first ads to support his work on KDnuggets.
KSP
was acquired by Xchange in April 2000, and Gregory worked for Xchange for about a year as a Chief Scientist, Analytics. During that time Xchange market value reached $1B (briefly), and then fell almost to zero.
Gregory left Xchange in May 2001, during the collapse of the dot com bubble, and has been publishing KDnuggets as an ad-supported site since then.
3. Present
KDnuggets website includes a directory of main areas
of data mining and data science, including
Software: Suites, Classification, Visuzalization, Text Mining, …
News
Jobs
Academic positions
Companies: Consulting, Products, Data Warehousing …
Datasets: Government/Public data portals, Data APIs, Marketplaces, Platforms, Data Search Engines.
Education in Analytics, Data Science, and Data Mining – online, certificates, US/Canada, Europe, Asia.
Analytics-based Solutions for different verticals: fraud-detection, CRM, data cleaning, …
Publications: books, introductory and professional, journals
A popular feature of KDnuggets is
Polls, especially the annual software poll asking “Which Analytics, Big Data, Data mining, Data Science software you used in the past 12 months?”.
Here are the results of the latest
2014 KDnuggets Analytics/Data Mining Software Poll.
Another popular feature is
Cartoons, which take a humorous look at Data Mining and Data Science.
Here is KDnuggets Feb 2014 Valentine’s Day cartoon:
Cartoon: Data Scientist Valentine Day Prediction:
Data Scientist: “Sweetheart, my neural net predicts that you and I are 98.9% compatible. Will you be my Valentine?”
KDnuggets also keeps a large directory of current events on Business Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science, including:
CFP (calls for papers)
Courses
Meetings
Webcasts
KDnuggets also offers a free
Data Mining Course – the teaching modules for a one-semester introductory course on Data Mining, suitable for advanced undergraduates or first-year graduate students.
The course, created by Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Prof. Gary Parker,
was funded by a grant from W. M. Keck Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
and is freely available on the web.
In November 2009, KDnuggets added blog-style, daily publication and switched to a custom PHP-style platform that Gregory wrote. With the continued growth in visitors and popularity, KDnuggets converted most directory and news pages from 2013 forward to WordPress and switched to publishing using WordPress platform in Jan 2014.
KDnuggets team, besides Gregory, now includes Anmol Rajpurohit, Grant Marshall, and Ran Bi.
In Feb 2009,
Gregory also added a
@KDnuggets Twitter, and later also a
Facebook page , and a
LinkedIn group.
KDnuggets LinkedIn group is among the
most active of all LinkedIn groups for Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science.
4. Awards and Recognition
KDnuggets.com and
Twitter have received wide industry
, including:
Forbes: Top Influencers in Big Data, 2012
voted the Best Big Data Tweeter by Big Data Republic, 2013
one of Information Management
7 Business Analytics Gurus on Twitter, 2013
In Hadoop Sphere Top Big Data influencers of 2013
No. 1 on May 2014 Top 100 Startup Experts to Follow on Twitter, 2014
in Information Week
10 Big Data Pros To Follow On Twitter, 2014
Whether the #BigData buzzword will stay or be replaced, the amount of data in the world will only grow, and so will the demand for people who can understand this data. That is the audience KDnuggets addresses, so the future looks bright.
Related:
INFORMS, Uniting Operations Research and Analytics
Moving from Data-Rich to Decision-Smart: INFORMS Conference The Business of Big Data 2014
KDnuggets Social Network in NodeXL, May 2014
First Issue of Knowledge Discovery Nuggets, 1993
First appearance of www.kdnuggets.com, 1997.
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Profile: KDnuggets Serves Analytics and Big Data Fields
