Data Analytics & Master of Science in Marketing Analysis

IEEE Big Data 2018 Congress in San Francisco, CA

Fri, 6 Jul 2018 10:26:07 +0200

Several hundreds of researchers and practitioners descended to San Francisco, CA to discuss all aspects of Big Data and more generally services. Giselle van Dongen (UGent PhD candidate & Data Scientist at Klarrio - @Klarr_io on Twitter) presented her work-in-progress paper “Latency Measurement of Fine-Grained Operations in Benchmarking Distributed Stream Processing Frameworks” (co-authors: Bram Steurtewagen and Dirk Van den Poel). This paper describes a benchmark for streaming frameworks to allow for accurate latency benchmarking of fine-grained individual stages of a processing pipeline. By determining the latency of distinct common operations in the processing flow instead of the end-to-end latency, we can form guidelines for efficient processing pipeline design. In this work, we use Apache Flink to validate the benchmark setup. The full paper will be published later this year. We thank Klarrio - The Lingua Franca Advocates for IoT and Analytics - for their continued (financial and other) support!

MScMA UGent 2018 Company Projects

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 18:37:22 +0200

This year, students of the Master of Science in Marketing Analysis carried out six projects. The following companies were involved this time: AG Insurance, SMS-Timing, AB Inbev, Modanisa.com and two organizations that wish to remain anonymous. We thank the companies/organizations involved for their great cooperation. The three-month project really is the crown jewel of the MScMA program, because it allows students to put into practice all the material (theory and programming skills) they learned during the year. Click here to see the list over our 19-year program history, which makes us the longest-running (predictive) analytics Master of Science program in the world! Most projects were carried out using open-source R and Apache Spark software. Special thanks go to Arno Liseune for coaching many of the projects.
The picture above is of the project for the company AG Insurance in Brussels. Unfortunately, the content of the project cannot be disclosed. They did such a great job that Thomas was offered a job at AG Insurance (Rani had already signed a contract at another company). Congratulations!

Five New PhD Graduates at Ghent University in Big Data Analytics

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 15:37:41 +0200

During the first half of 2018 in total five PhD students have graduated in the field of Big Data Analytics with Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel as supervisor at Ghent University. We would like to thank the different international experts involved for assessing the work. These students have already produced 10+ publications for internationally renowned journals. As to the future of these new PhDs/doctors. Two of them already accepted job offers from foreign business schools (UK and France) to become assistant professors in data analytics. Congratulations to all five new PhDs!
Here are more details about each of them (in reverse chronological order):

Dr. Matthias Bogaert
(Public Defense on June 28, 2018, co-advisor: Prof. Dr. Michel Ballings)
His work is titled “Harnessing the Power of Social Media in Predictive Analytics.”

Data Analytics/Business Engineering 2018 Presentations

Thu, 5 Apr 2018 15:17:51 +0200

As part of the course “Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics” of Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel and supported by Matthias Bogaert, Steven Hoornaert and Matthijs Meire, students worked on a real-life case study using the open-source statistical programming language R. Congratulations to all teams.

Francqui Chair awarded to Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel on Big Data Analytics

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 18:47:48 +0100

To honor his pioneering role in Big Data Analytics in Belgium the University of Namur awarded a Francqui Chair to Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel (@dirkvandenpoel). The Francqui Chair consists of five lectures in total. 100+ attendees confirmed that it is a very hot topic also in industry. The inaugural lecture provided an introduction to Data Analytics for Business, which includes descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics as well as a brief intro into Big Data. The increasing availability of different kinds of data allows for improvements to predictive models: audio, images, video, network data, … . Next, he illustrated how Big Data Analytics improves business results. Examples in the realm of analytical Customer Relationship Management, credit scoring, design of optimal retail networks, human resources, and the interface with logistics were provided. He also discussed the many challenges.