Several of us at SAS are gearing up for the 16th annual ACM SIGKDD conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. If you are not familiar with this, it is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences. The KDD-2010 program features keynote presentations, oral paper presentations, poster sessions, workshops, tutorials, panels, exhibits, demonstrations, and the famous KDD Cup competition!

SAS is proud to be a sponsor of KDD-2010 this year. Our onsite team includes SAS Product Management, Research & Development, and Product Marketing. We'll be heading to Washington, DC from July 25-28 to attend the conference and demo our software in the booth - including the latest data mining and text analytics capabilities. Please look out for us and say hello, stop by the booth and learn what’s new! Be sure to enter to win a copy of the Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications – in the meantime, you can download a chapter excerpt on Top 10 Data Mining Mistakes.

To learn more from SAS at the event, you can also attend the Poster Reception II and Demo Session on Tuesday night in Indepedence Center B for a demo on Automatic Topic Discovery presented by James Cox and Richard Foley.

For those of you heading to DC, I’d encourage you to click here to access the official KDD-2010 Social Networking Interactive Schedule. I just updated my account, which allows you to update and add talks to your conference schedule calendar using Outlook or other popular calendar programs, leave notes, ask questions to presenters, and engage in other ways. Check it out! If you are the social media type, you’ll probably also want to follow @kdd_news on twitter as well. If you aren't going, take a peak at The Text Frontier Blog later this month to get our perspective on the event!