Dr. Goutam Chakraborty is a professor of marketing and founder of the SAS and OSU Data Mining Certificate Program at Oklahoma State University. He has been involved with the annual data mining conference for five years and also teaches a Business Knowledge Series course, "Getting the Most Out of Testing in Direct/Internet Marketing". Read below to get his unique perspective of M2010 and more information about his course, which he’ll be teaching at the conference.

1. You’ve had numerous roles at the M-series of data mining conferences: co-chair, speaker, sponsor, attendee and instructor. What information can you share about the conference with first-time attendees?

GC: This conference is really focused on data mining and analytics and not very large in size. As a result, you will have a chance not just to meet but actually get to know some of the experts in the industry and academia who are working on data mining and analytics problems. First time attendees should feel totally comfortable to walk up to any speaker, session chair, conference chair and get to know them. That is the culture of this conference.

2. Why do you continue to be involved with M2010?

GC: Because it is the place to be when your interests lie in learning new tools/techniques/applications in data mining and business analytics. Frankly, I get more out of attending this conference than many other conferences (academic or professional) that I have attended in my last 20+ years .

3. You are a professor in the Department of Marketing at Oklahoma State University and you’ve had several teams of your students compete in the Data Mining Shootout. A few of your teams have placed in the top 3. How does this competition serve the academic community?

GC: The shootout run by SAS and sponsored by Dow and CMRC (Central Michigan University Research Corp) is a vital link in development of students' skills in working with real business problems and answering those problems using data mining. It gives students from any university a chance to compete against their peers from other universities and in the process discover how good they really are. Let’s face it – competition brings out the best among each of the student teams and regardless of their actual standing all teams learn a lot in the process.

4. You are teaching your course, "Getting the Most Out of Testing in Direct/Internet Marketing", again this year during our post-conference training. Can you give a brief description of this course and tell us why M2010 attendees should consider taking it?

GC: This is a 1-day course that focuses primarily on applications of testing in the context of Direct and Internet marketing. The course starts with basics of testing and then takes the participants through a series of applications using analysis techniques such as one-way ANOVA, multi-factors ANOVA, MANOVA, Blocking, ANCOVA, etc. The focus of the course is on applications (not mechanics, formulas or testing of assumptions) using real data and interpretation of results of the tests and taking appropriate business decisions.

5. What are some of the hot topics in data mining right now?

GC: Text mining, customer lifecycle management models, customer life time value models.

Editor's Note: M2010 will cover all of these topics.

6. Do you have a favorite restaurant or show in Las Vegas that you can recommend?

GC: You really cannot go wrong in Vegas! For restaurant, my favorite is Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab (order their stone crabs!) and for shows Penn and Teller and Cirque du Soleil.