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

My Presentation at VirtaThon 2011

I will be giving a presentation on the Oracle Data Miner New Features at the online conference VirtaThon, on Monday 18th July.

VirtaThon is a FREE 6 day conference with 2 parallel sessions with world leading speakers on Oracle Java and MySQL. 

Previously attendance at the conference cost $100, which was good value considering the quality of the speakers. But this year it is Free.

The VirtaThon conference runs from 16th July to 21st July

The schedule is available at

http://www.brainsurface.com/virtathon/sessions-schedule

To sign up to attend some or all of the sessions go to

http://bit.ly/ehlaV9

Attend4FREE! Jul 16-21: 6 Days of Expert+ Sessions #VirtaThon The Online Conference for the Oracle, Java & MySQL Domains http://bit.ly/ehlaV9

Recent ODM activity

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been a little bit busy with some Oracle Data Miner 11gR2 related activities. These include

• Writing an article called Oracle Data Miner Comes of Age for submission to Oracle Scene, the UKOUG quarterly magazine. I was told on 20th April that my article was accepted and will be in the June edition
• The call for presentations opened for the annual UKOUG conference in Birmingham in December. I submitted a presentation which will be based on the article in Oracle Scene.
• I submitted 2 presentations to Oracle Open World in October. But funding might be a problem here. I’ve asked the ODM development group to see if they could sponsor some of the costs. One presentation is on Oracle Data Miner. The second is on
• I also submitted a presentation to an online (virtual) Oracle conference called VirtaThon, again on Oracle Data Miner.

Some other things that I have planned are

• Create two videos for the Oracle Scene article. The first video is a short intro to the article. The plan is to have this on the UKOUG website to promote the article. The second video will be based on the article, covering the material and the demo in the article
• Create a video on creating an ODM repository and getting started with ODM
• Create a video on removing the ODM repository
• Create a video on saving/exporting a DM model from ODM
• Write an article on what Oracle products can be used throughout the Data Mining LifeCycle (CRISP-DM). Hopefully I will submit this for the autumn edition of Oracle Scene.
• Get all the documentation available on the data manipulation stage in the new ODM tool and write an article based on this, produce a video of it, etc

All of this to be finished by the middle of June.

So I have a busy few weeks ahead of me.