OSU graduate students excel in national data mining competition

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

(Nov. 17, 2009   Stillwater, OK) – Two teams of Oklahoma State University graduate students received national recognition in the data mining shootout at the M2009 Data Mining Conference held Oct. 26-27 in Las Vegas.

More than 40 teams from many U.S. universities competed for honors in the contest. OSU students Vineet Jain, Syed Nawaz and Liz Garmendia received second place, and Ridhima Nerlekar, Snigdha Potluri, Murali Bolloju, Chatchawal Ngamchitroongruang, Yumiao Sun and Guangyu Lan received an honorable mention.

All students on the second-place team all enrolled via distance learning in the graduate certificate in business data mining program in the Spears School of Business. The students receiving honorable mentions are full-time master’s degree students from management information systems, MBA and industrial engineering disciplines, and all are enrolled in the data mining certificate program, which is a core component of the MIS degree.

“It is a great honor for OSU students to receive these awards in front of a large international audience of data mining and analytics professionals,” said Goutam Chakraborty, a professor of marketing for the Spears School, founder of the SAS/OSU data mining certificate program, founder of the graduate certificate in business data mining program and coach for each of the data mining shootout teams.

The M2009 Data Mining Conference is the largest gathering of data mining professionals in the world, with more than 650 experts in attendance. The conference was sponsored by SAS, the Central Michigan University Research Corporation and Dow Chemical. OSU’s teams won a total of $3,000, which will be used to promote data mining teaching and support graduate students in the data mining program.

“These honors are a testament of the quality of our students and the outstanding efforts of different faculty that teach classes in OSU’s data mining certificate program” Chakraborty said. “Student teams from our data mining certificate programs have been honored in national data mining shootout three years in a row! We have clearly built one of the most nationally recognized and acclaimed data mining certificate programs.”

For more information about the data mining shootout, the M2009 Data Mining Conference or the data mining certificate program at the Spears School, call Chakraborty at 405-744-7644 or email goutam.chakraborty@okstate.edu.