Excavating Wealth Of Information

Updated on: Friday, November 06, 2009

It saw a good turnout with more than 54 enthusiastic participants from diverse backgrounds attending the seminar. They were mostly faculty and research scholars from different institutes across the city. The registration had to be closed due to space crunch. It must be mentioned that the workshop was for free with the participants having to pay only for their food.

A big hit in the Western academia and industry, data mining is set to take the city by storm. It was for the first time that the city witnessed such a workshop. The brainchild of Prof R Chakraborty, faculty of the department of business management, CU, it was aimed at opening our eyes to the vast reserves of data available at the click of a mouse.

Presided over by Prof Subrata Basu, an introduction to the subject in question was given by RP Singh who went on to speak about data understanding and preparation. To simplify things further RP Singh also spoke at length about some case studies. About data mining, Prof R Chakraborty said, “It identifies hidden patterns underlying voluminous data in such a way that it can be used in fraud detection, banking, medicine, pharmaceuticals, scientific data analysis, web mining. There is hardly any field that has remained untouched by it.”

Prof Tanupa Chakraborty, who teaches commerce at Calcutta University, also one of the participants in the workshop, said, “Data mining as opposed to statistics has an operational flexibility allowing one and all to reap its advantages.” It was also brought to notice by Dr Tanupa that the linguistics department of Calcutta University also uses SPSS extensively. An ambitious project, if executed properly, it will surely transform the face of research in India.

Dr Sharmishtha Banerjee, a faculty of the business management department of CU, said, “It is an attempt at making academics industry-oriented. In the face of global competition, we felt the urgency to update the methods and approaches of pedagogy.”

Singh was there to promote SPSS, which is a readymade software used in data mining. It can be called a data-mining workbench that enables one to quickly develop predictive models using business expertise and deploy them into business operations to improve decision-making. In short, it helps narrow down the search to suit the requirement of the subject or individual in question.

Dr Ramit Roy, who teaches computer science at St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, said, “More the amount of data, the more accurate are the results. In fact, let me point out to you that such softwares are of unprecedented help to people like us who are clueless about statistics.”

With this event being a success, the university officials are looking forward to hold more such workshops spread across a number of days to spread the message of data mining. Dr Kalyan Mitra, professor at Marine Engineering and Research Institute, who prolonged his stay in the city to be a part of the event is hopeful of a change to come.

Excavating Wealth Of Information

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