Data Mining at Institute of Technology Blanchardstown

The Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (ITB), which opened in September 1999, will celebrate the graduation of its first year of degree students this year. In the four years since it opened, the college has developed a range of innovative computing programmes, three of which include data mining modules making data mining an important component of both undergraduate and post-graduate computing programmes being run at the college.The focus of the data mining modules is on Knowledge Discovery in Data, encompassing both Datawarehousing/OLAP and Data Mining.

At undergraduate level, we deliver a 12 week data mining module in the Diploma year of our 4-year Degree programme in Computing. This module covers:

• Data warehouse design and implementation including integration of heterogeneous data models.
• OLAP.
• Preparing data for a data mining process – learning the application domain, data selection, data cleaning, data transformation & data reduction.
• Applying the appropriate data mining model function to a given scenario – using decision trees, neural networks, and other statistical modelling techniques for clustering, classification and market basket analysis.
• Critically analyse the role of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in the market place.

Students in the Degree year of our Computer Services Management B.Sc. will also study Knowledge Discovery in Data in a more detailed 20 week module. Topics covered are similar to those detailed above with additional emphasis on planning for storage requirements and performance tuning. The Computer Services Management degree is part of our Accelerated Technician Programme. September 2003 will be our first intake of 4^th year students to this programme.

We are launching a new taught Masters in Computing programme this September at ITB which encompasses a range of computing disciplines including data mining. The data mining module is aimed at students who want to study advanced concepts relating to knowledge discovery in data, both in data warehousing and data mining. The module addresses a range of topics such as:

• Data warehouse design to improve performance and scalability.
• Exposing the information content of a data set, while minimising dimensionality.
• Understanding and optimising the performance of mining algorithms.

We also hope, in the coming year, to embark on a research programme to support post-graduate students interested in doing further research in data mining.

Contact: Geraldine Gray, Lecturer, School of Informatics and Engineering, Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Blanchardstown Road North, Dublin 15.
E-Mail: geraldine.gray@itb.ie Tel:+353-1-8851083, Web: http://www.itb.ie/