topic Re: What conference do you choose? in SAS Data Science

What conference do you choose?

FionaMcNeill — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:59:08 GMT

With so many conferences now in the field of text analytics, I'm wondering which you find to be the most beneficial - and why?

On a short list we of the business related conferences we have: TAW, TA Summit, Sentiment Analysis Syposium, KM World (who has announced their call for papers - due March 1st for the November 6-8th conference in DC) -- which all seem to appeal to very different audiences. And then there are a plethora of academic conferences. What do you attend/want to attend and why?

Re: What conference do you choose?

JuliaM — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 20:24:39 GMT

I went to the Text Analytics World in Boston in October 2012 as well as the KM World in Washington DC in October 2012. I had different reasons for going to each of the conferences.

The TAW conference allowed me to connect with a colleague from SAS whom I had not met face-to-face. TAW was also a good place to find other people who were working in the text analytics field.

I went to the Taxonomy Bootcamp part of the KM World conference to see what other people in Knowledge Management were doing with taxonomies, particularly with regards to communicating with stakeholders of taxonomies and other controlled vocabularies.

I would say that the networking opportunities that a conference provides is one of the big draws for me, along with hearing some of the new innovations that other people are working on.

Re: What conference do you choose?

SethGrimes — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:54:24 GMT

I'd welcome your attending the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, which I run. Text analytics is well represented but not the only topic -- I usually try to cover crowd sourcing, speech/video analysis, and emerging technologies (e.g., live polling at the next symposium, which is May 8 in New York) -- and the main symposium day is applications focused.

I'm also the founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit, next up June 5-6 Boston. I don't own that conference, but I can tell you that we're working to infuse more forward-looking content in the program, to help attendees stay on the forward edge of the tech curve.

I've never attended Text Analytics World, but I know chair Tom Reamy, and he and the parent conference, Predictive Analysis World, have a very SAS-y mind-set although from what I've heard, TAW is about half the size (around 70 attendees at the last one) of the sentiment symposium (160 expected in NY) or the TAS (I'm guessing about the same) with fewer vendors represented.

If you're into taxonomy and content management, KMWorld could be a good conference for you. But for text analytics, it and linked conferences (Enterprise Search Summit, Taxonomy Bootcamp, the Sharepoint conference) offer little of interest.

Lastly, if you're interested in technical approaches to harvesting social media, check out the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) in July in Boston. It has a lot of academic/research participation.

Re: What conference do you choose?

TomReamy — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:43:40 GMT

As a friendly competitor with Seth, I, not surprisingly, have a slightly different
perspective. And as program chair for TAW, I’m somewhat biased, but the conference in Boston that Julia attended was
my first as program chair and while as Seth notes, it was small, hopefully the
upcoming conference in San
Francisco, April 17-18 will be larger. The focus of the conference is to
cover the full spectrum of text analytics rather than the social
media/sentiment analysis focus on TAS (at least that has been the focus for the
ones that I was at). As far as being “SAS-y”, that is probably partially the result of my long association with SAS although
my company also has been partnering with other text analytics companies like
Smart Logic, Concept Searching, and Expert Systems.

I would also somewhat disagree about Taxonomy Boot Camp and Enterprise Search
Summit as of little interest to text analytics people, although certainly
KMWorld has very little text analytics. Theother two have been slightly increasing their text analytics coverage – enough so
I’m not the only text analytics speaker which I’ve been for a couple of years. For
example, one last shameless plug –I’ve giving a three hour workshop on text
analytics at Enterprise Search Summit in New York this May.

In addition, SemTech is an interesting conference that touches on text analytics tangentially although
the focus is on the semantic web. They have a conference in San Francisco in June and while text analytics is a minor
part, they are quite large with about 800 people last time.

Re: What conference do you choose?

JuliaM — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:52:20 GMT

For those of you who are interested, take a look at the What's the Big Data? page which lists dozens of events for Big Data including Text Analytics events.

Re: What conference do you choose?

art297 — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:58:21 GMT

: Disappointing that SGF2013 isn't listed as one of the events, regardless of whether we are talking about text analytics or big data. Many of us can only go to one or two conferences a year and have to select wisely.

Re: What conference do you choose?

JuliaM — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 02:28:27 GMT

Hello Arthur,

What is SGF2013? Can you provide a link?

Re: What conference do you choose?

SethGrimes — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 03:17:57 GMT

Julia, SGF2013 = SAS Global Forum 2013, http://support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/2013/index.html http://support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/2013/index.html

Re: What conference do you choose?

JuliaM — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 02:09:53 GMT

Thanks to both Seth and Arthur. I had heard of the SAS Global Forum, but I had never heard of the acronym "SGF" before. :smileyconfused:

Re: What conference do you choose?

MicheleReister — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:44:47 GMT

Another conference that might be of interest is the Analytics Conference Series, hosted by SAS. It's an educational series of events (one in the US and one in Europe) focusing on all things analytics (data mining, text mining, visual analytics, optimization, forecasting, predictive modeling, etc. This year the conferences will be held in London, June 19-20 and Orlando, October 21-22. www.sas.com/analyticsseries.