VirtaThon Presentation

Today I gave my VirtaThon presentation on the new Oracle Data Miner 11gR2 tool.

It was an interesting experience as VirtaThon was a virtual conference. The organisation and administration of the conference was excellent.

I had over 25 participants for my presentation, including Carolyn Hamm who has written a book on using Oracle Data Miner 10g.  She seemed to enjoy my presentation as she was asking for more at the end, but we had run out of time.

The presentation was an unusual but interesting experience. All the participants were muted, so I could not hear anyone or be asked questions as the presentation progressed. I was not able to judge the body language or facial expressions, for me to work out how the presentation was going.

I was sitting in my living room when giving the presentation and spent almost an hour talking to myself. At time the concentration levels dipped and I have to refocus and used some visualisation to help me concentrate.

The presentation was divided into 2 parts. The first part was a presentation consisting of some background to ODM, how to get setup and running with ODM, and finally a discussion of some of the new features. This first part took approx. 30 minutes which surprised me as during my rehearsals it was talking 16 minutes. The second part of the presentation was a demo of using ODM to create a workflow, generating a classification model and then applying this model to some new data. During my rehearsals this was taking approx. 40 minutes.

I only had 50-55 minutes for my VirtaThon presentation so after my presentation I had 20-25 minutes for the demo. So I had to get through the demo quickly and I had to cut out a discussion of how the data exploration functionality in ODM can be used to get an insight into the data before you start using the data mining features. I will put together a blog post and video of this in a couple of weeks time that will explain it in more detail.

I managed to finish at 49 minutes, which left 6 minutes for questions. There was only a couple of questions, plenty of Thank You’s along with Good Presentation, which is always good to hear.

Thank you to everyone who attended the presentation and to the organisers of VirtaThon.

Brendan Tierney