Data on alien sightings shows a spike on July 4th, but does that mean that aliens love America?

David Weisman, Ph.D., adjunct professor of biology – computational data mining of very large biological data sets; systems and network biology; and bioinformatics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, makes the point that data can tell a story, but if it’s misinterpreted, it doesn’t tell the right story.

RapidMiner Wisdom attracts ‘serious data science geeks’

Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, kicked off RapidMiner Wisdom in NYC by discussing the morning’s keynote address by Dr. Weisman.

Vellante described RapidMiner Wisdom, with its theme of “predictive analytics reimagined” as a data scientist conference for serious geeks. RapidMiner (Rapid-I, Inc.) is a leader in the predictive analytics field, and it just received a $16 million investment from Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) to help fuel the growing demand for RapidMiner’s predictive analytics platform.

Questioning the ethics of analysis

Frick emphasized how there are many ways you can present the data to support whatever it is you want to support, and how throwing around random numbers with no basis leads to ethical issues. He looks forward to interviewing some of the top minds in the predictive analytics field during theCUBE’s coverage of RapidMiner Wisdom and discussing topics such as ethics, as well as the relationship between data scientists and business, systems of intelligence, prediction vs. causation, and the citizen data scientist.

Vellante listed many questions he is looking to answer during upcoming interview, such as:

• How are decisions being made on ROI and technical feasibility?
• How much time is spent cleaning the data to fit the algorithm vs. bending the algorithm to fit the data? and;
• Can we really make correlations between excellent data science and profitability?

Describing the Big Data cloud as being a key theme for theCUBE in 2016, Vellante wrapped the event kickoff segment by listing events that theCUBE will be attending in upcoming months, including Spark Summit East and West, Big Data events, and the Hadoop summit in Dublin, Ireland.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of RapidMiner Wisdom 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE