**PREMIA NEWSLETTER (ISSUE 5)** *Members' Spotlight: Mr. Chia Khai Meng* Chia Khai Meng works at the Customer Insight Department at StarHub Ltd. His job involves data mining, ad hoc analytics and report generation for the management and other users. He creates segmentation and predictive models that model customer behaviour. His work supports StarHub's Hubbing Strategy, by enabling its marketers gain greater insight of its customers, and achieve the best returns on investment (ROI) from StarHub's marketing activities. Khai Meng has 20 years of experience in various industries, with the last 10 years in data mining. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Information Technology from the Queensland University of Technology. *Short Course on Data Mining* PREMIA is planning to conduct a short course on data mining in early May at NUS. The exact date and venue will be announced in due course. The following are some preliminary information: The course will consist of two days. The first day will be on concepts and techniques of Data Mining, while the second day will be on practical applications and issues on Data Mining. A text book, "Data Mining: Concepts and Tecnniques" by J. Han and M. Kamber will be provided as part of the course teaching materials. Tentative schedule Day 1: Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 09.00 - 10.30: Knowledge Discovery Process 10.30 - 10.45: Break 10.45 - 12.00: Classification Algorithms 12.00 - 13.30: Lunch 13.30 - 15.00: Association Rules Algorithms 15.00 - 15.15: Break 15.15 - 17.00: Clustering Algorithms Day 2: Data Mining: Applications and Issues 09.00 - 09.45: Text Data Mining 09.45 - 10.30: Fraud Data Mining 10.30 - 10.45: Break 10.45 - 11.30: Bio Data Mining 11.30 - 12.15: Network Data Mining 12.15 - 13.30: Lunch 13.30 - 15.00: Business Data Mining 15.00 - 15.15: Break 15.15 - 17.00: Hands-on session *Member's Night* We had a full house for our members' night where good food, speakers and friends all came together at the Grand Plaza Parkroyal during the New Year. Mr. Pei Sai Fan from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Dr. David Lee from Ferrell Asset Management lectured to us on Financial Engineering and Machine Intelligence in the World of Modern Finance. Both speakers are experts in financial engineering and shared their perspective on how the use of machine intelligence tools influences financial services, and gave predictions on personal wealth management for the year of the Rat. All members were treated to a lucky packet (hongbao) and a four lucky members walked away with lucky draw prizes of 4GB iPod Nanos and Challenger vouchers. Make sure to register for members' night next year to have a chance at these fabulous door prizes! *PREMIA seminars* Our seminars committee has been keeping busy in making sure impactful seminars have come in the last few months. Professor Stan Ziqing Li, currently at National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR) gave a lecture in November to members entitled "Solutions for Accurate and Fast Face Recognition and Intelligent Video Surveillance". Slides for this lecture are now available on-line at the PREMIA website (you must log-in first): Associate Professor Andy Chun, currently with the City University of Hong Kong also graced us with his seminar entitled "Enterprise Optimization Using AI: Hong Kong Case Studies" later in November. We're currently in the process of inviting other distinguished speakers for upcoming seminars. Watch your inbox for more exciting seminar announcements! *PREMIA Best paper awards* PREMIA has offered three Best Student Paper awards for papers published in 2007. The result was announced in PREMIA Members' Night 2008 in Grand Plaza Park Hotel on Feb 18 2008. Liu Feng was the winner of the first prize and a cool $1,000, for his article "A novel generic Hebbian ordering based fuzzy rule base reduction approach to Mamdani neuro-fuzzy system", published with Neural Computation. Students Tan Tuan Zea and Pham Minh Tri tied for second place. Tan Tuan Zea was honored for his article entitled "Biological brain-inspired genetic complementary learning for stock market and bank failure prediction", published in Computational Intelligence last May. Pham Minh Tri was honored for his ICCV 2007 paper entitled "Fast Training and Selection of Haar features using Statistics in Boostingbased Face Detection". Read more about it and see the awards presentation pictures by visiting: This inaugural event is likely to become an annual event, so we look forward to your great papers and submissions next year! *Upcoming Asia/Pacific Rim IAPR conferences and events* Call for papers: [PRIB 2008] October 2008 Australia - 3rd IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics. Deadline for Papers: April 15 2008. [DAS 2008] 8th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2008). Deadline for regular papers: 31 Mar; Deadline for extended abstracts and demo abstracts: 1 July. A full list of conferences is available directly from the IAPR website at: *IAPR newsletter* Get the latest issue from PREMIA website or IAPR website , or use the links below to get the newsletters directly from the premia-sg.org website: October 2007: January 2008: *PREMIA Members' benefits* Join PREMIA, a chapter of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) . Benefits of PREMIA membership include: - All the benefits of IAPR membership, including the quarterly IAPR e- Newsletter, and a 10% discount in registration fees for all IAPR conferences and workshops . - PREMIA Members enjoy discounted or free attendance at local PREMIA events, including industry outreach activities, focused seminars, conferences, courses, or lectures. ... among other privileges. If you are not a PREMIA member yet, come join us at http://www.premia-sg.org/content/view/9/55/