This workshop, held over 24-26 June, provided an in-depth introduction to what Data Mining is, what is required to set up a Data Mining environment, how to undertake a successful Data Mining project and how to do Data Mining using SAS Enterprise Miner. The first day gave an executive overview while the second and third days were hands-on, held in a computer laboratory with full demonstration capabilities.

This workshop was a repeat of one held in Palmerston North in March, but there was a marked difference in the type of person attending the Auckland workshop. On average the Auckland people had more of a statistical background than the Palmerston North attendees. It was good to have interaction between business and academic statisticians and to see this interaction resulting in the summer recruitment of a Massey student by a local bank. What will she be doing? Data Mining of course!

The reviews suggest that the workshop was successful, providing the participants with what they needed to start using Data Mining seriously in their respective businesses. It is likely that the workshop will be presented in Wellington and Christchurch later in the year. Interested participants should please contact Siva Ganesh at Palmerston North (s.ganesh@massey.ac.nz) or Denny Meyer at Auckland ( d.h.meyer@massey.ac.nz).

The 16th Australian Statistical Conference was held 7-11 July 2002 at the National Convention Centre, Canberra. A good contingent of 23 from NZ participated. Details of the programme are at http://www.statsoc.org.au/asc16.html. The presentation for Nick Fisher’s challenging Presidential address "Statistics and the status quo" is at http://www.statsoc.org.au/pdfs/presaddress2002.pdf. The SSAI has initiated a public awareness campaign with "Statistics: a job for professionals" as its slogan. Nick offered his working definition that "Statistics is the science of managing uncertainty".

The Waikato University Statistics Department had the honour of hosting the NZSA One-day Conference for 2002. This was held on June 10, in conjunction with a one-day workshop on Data Mining on June 11. In keeping with this, the theme of the conference was "Data Mining", and most of the contributed papers were in this area. The invited speaker was Alan Lee from University of Auckland and his keynote address was entitled "Empirical Bayes Regression".

The Data Mining workshop was presented by members of the Computer Science Department at the University of Waikato. The workshop looked at Data Mining from a Machine Learning Perspective using the software Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA), which has been developed at this University. The main presenters were Geoff Holmes and Bernhard Pfaringer and they were assisted in the hands-on tutorial by senior students Richard Kirkby, Gabi Schmidberger and Xin Xu. The general consensus of the attendees was that it had been a worthwhile experience.

Judi McWhirter

Karen Devoy and Judi McWhirter