Open house addresses data mining's challenges
In many banks, sensors in the window glass pick up vibrations that signal a break-in. This is good--except during a thunderstorm, when vibrations cause the sensors to send a false alarm signal. The same thing may happen to security sensors in ATM machines that pick up vibrations caused by street cleaners. These examples, courtesy of professor Jaideep Svistava of the University's computer science and engineering department, show how difficult it can be to mine nuggets of meaning from the mountains of data being generated and stored in databases. On Thursday, the University's Digital Technology Center (DTC) brought together University and industry people in an open house to plan the first steps in overcoming the challenges of so-called "data mining."