DATA AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR CLEVERNESS
Keynote Speaker: Michael Berry

Well-known data mining author and educator, Michael Berry, is the keynote speaker for this conference. Berry is the author of the introductory data mining book, Data Mining: Techniques for Marketing, Sales and Customer Relationship Management, the second edition of which was published in 2004. He has also written two other data mining books, Mining the Web and Mastering Data Mining. Berry, along with coauthor Gordon Linoff, founded the consulting firm Data Miners. Berry notes that a lot has changed since the first edition of Data Mining Techniques was first published in 1997.

Speaking on the theme "data as a substitute for cleverness," Berry will talk about how the field of statistics grew up in an environment of limited data and limited computing resources that put a premium on cleverness. Data miners, many of whom lack much formal training in statistics, have sometimes succeeded in overcoming that handicap by taking advantage of the huge quantities of data available in corporate databases. As an example, Berry will discuss the way data miners have adopted and adapted survival analysis techniques developed in the insurance industry and applied them to time-to-event calculations such as subscriber churn and time-to-next-purchase.

A data mining educator as well as a consultant, Michael is in demand as a keynote speaker and seminar leader in the area of data mining generally and the application of data mining to customer relationship management in particular.

Prior to founding Data Miners, Michael spent 8 years at Thinking Machines Corporation. There he specialized in the application of massively parallel supercomputing techniques to business and marketing applications, including one of the largest database marketing systems of the time. He later ran a data mining laboratory for Naviant Technology Solutions.

Michael has both US and EU passports and possesses reading and limited speaking knowledge of Spanish and French.