Data Mining and Data Usability

Sara Graves, University of Alabama, Huntsville

With the large amounts of data in many forms and the needs of users also in many forms, there is a critical 'data usability' problem.  Data mining techniques can offer solutions for some of the data usability problems, but only if more users are able to actually understand and exercise the data mining techniques.  Data mining environments that are being created such that both scientists and engineers will be able to better explore the use of various mining techniques to assist them in the 'use' of their data will be discussed in this talk.  There remains a challenge to the data mining community to continue the development of techniques, applications and environments to address the data usability issues faced in many fields.

Biography

Sara Graves is the Director of the Information Technology and Systems Center and University Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.  She is also the Director of the Information Technology Research Center at the National Space Science and Technology Center. She has served as a member of the NASA Headquarters Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee (ESSAAC) and Chair of the ESSAAC Subcommittee on Information Systems and Services (ESISS). She directs research and development in large-scale distributed information systems, data mining and knowledge discovery, high performance computing and networking, grid technologies and services, geospatial data analysis and visualization and bioinformatics