Spears School students earn national honors in research poster contest

Monday, October 18, 2010

Two master of science students from the management information systems program in the Oklahoma State University Spears School of Business have earned two of the top five student poster awards at the M2010 Data Mining Conference, which will be held October 25 and 26 in Las Vegas.

As a part of the award, OSU students Maheshwar R. Nareddy and Murali Krishna Pagolu are receiving a full-expense paid trip from SAS to attend M2010 and present their papers in poster format. Nareddy will present a poster about his paper titled “Improving Customer Loyalty Program through Text Mining of Customers’ Comments.” Pagolu will present a poster about his paper titled “Eliminating Response Style Segments in Survey data via Double Standardization before Clustering.”

The M2010 Data Mining Conference is an international educational conference and exhibition for data mining practitioners including analysts, statisticians, programmers, consultants and anyone involved with data management within their organization. Hosted by SAS, M2010 is now in its 13th year and has become the world's largest data mining conference, attracting more than 600 people from various industries.

At the M2010 conference, poster presentations provide an excellent opportunity for data mining practitioners to present their projects in a one-to-one setting and receive professional feedback from leaders in the field of data mining. The five most impressive poster abstracts submitted by students are selected among many posters submitted by graduate students from different universities.

“It always feels great to be a part of something important,” Nareddy said. “It is such an honor to be recognized for this project.”

Pagolu agreed, adding that he never imagined an opportunity like this to come his way.

“I feel very fortunate and look forward to the future,” he said. “This has inspired me to begin thinking of a new project in the area of text analytics.”

Goutam Chakraborty, professor of marketing in the Spears School, supervised Nareddy and Pagolu on their award-winning projects.

“Mahesh and Murali worked very hard in applying cutting edge mining techniques on two different data sets and coming up with these ideas,” Chakraborty said. “I am very pleased to see their posters getting selected in top 5 spots. It is a great honor for them and our data mining certificate program.”