THE Australian city of Sydney witnessed a gathering of the world’s foremost researchers and practitioners in data mining, knowledge discovery, data analytics and big data at the 21st ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference (KDD15).
The event, co-located with the Big Data Summit, kicked off at Hilton Sydney on Monday and will conclude today.
New South Wales (NSW) Minister for Trade, Tourism & Major Events, Stuart Ayres MP, who was also a guest speaker during the conference, said: “This is the first time Australia has ever hosted this prestigious event and it is only the second time it has been held in the Asia Pacific region. It’s a great opportunity to highlight Australian achievements in big data.”
Ayres shared that the event will inject more than A$2 million (US$1.5 million) to the NSW economy and “support thousands of jobs”.
Business Events Sydney CEO, Lyn Lewis-Smith, said winning the conference for Sydney was a major milestone.
“This conference is usually held in the northern hemisphere and is unlikely to return to Australia for many years,” said Lewis-Smith.
More than 1,000 participants were at the event, according to KDD15 general chair and director of the Advanced Analytics Institute at University of Technology Sydney, Longbing Cao.
Explaining the event organiser’s decision to take the event to Sydney, Cao said: “Sixty-four per cent of the nation’s technology start-ups are based in New South Wales and Sydney is home to more than two thirds of Australia’s ICT headquarters….”
