A very busy week with PostgreSQL and Data Mining

by Marcos Ortiz

The last week was a very busy week for me, participating in two great events.

First thing: 4th Cuban PgDay

Here, I put some pictutes of the event:

The whole team and Gilberto (main PostgreSQL contact in Cuba)

Some members of the team and me discussing about new features in PostgreSQL-9.2

My colleague Anthony talking about some of the services that we provide in the Department of PostgreSQL, in our Development Center

Second thing: Data Mining Course

The last two days of the week were for a great Data Mining course taught by Dr. Armando Plasencia at the ICIMAF.

This was a nice experience because I always have been interested to know more about this topic, and Dr. Plasencia gave to us a great introduction to it. SVM, Bayensian methods, Collaborating filtering, Clustering, Logistic regression, Neural networks, and many more things; all these were keywords in the course, and then, he showed to us some great examples how to use Data Mining to tackle hard problems like security analysis, fraud detection for financial applications, drug analysis, and more.

I know, this is a very hard content, but, at ICIMAF, they have a great Master program in Computer Science with a track focused on Data Mining. You can read more about this program in the official site. Here, I let you the picture of the colleagues that participated in the course:

The mix between professionals in the course was great:

  • a PhD student from Ecuador,
  • an Automatic Control Engineering girl (she is an student of the Master program focused on Automatic Control track)
  • two of my colleagues which are experts in Data Warehousing techniques and Business Intelligence
  • two colleagues with experience in Healthcare Information systems
  • one of my colleagues focused on Genetic Informatics applications
  • and the professor Dr. Plasencia.

So, this was a great introduction to Data Mining but one of the first things that I learned was:

“the tools will change always, but base theory will keep in the same way a lot of time, it’s not change very much; so you have to study and read very much to obtain this knowledge; so don’t waist your time and begin right now ”

So, if you want to know more about Data Mining, start right now, if you like to work with Data; you will send a simple message: “THANK YOU” Stay tuned for big news !!! Happy hacking !!! @marcosluis2186