Looking backwards, looking forwards: SAS, data mining, and machine learning

Looking forward, ten of my SAS colleagues and I are heading to New York City this weekend for KDD 2014: Data Science for the Social Good, which runs August 24-27. This event's full name is the 20th Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, but it is more commonly known as ACM SIGKDD, or just KDD for short. Looking backwards, the first KDD workshop was held in 1989, and these workshops eventually grew into the series of conferences. Whether you still call it data mining, or prefer machine learning or data science, the fact that this year the conference is sold out, with the 2,200 registered exceeding all expectations, is a sign of the trending of this topic. KDD's tagline today is "bringing together the data mining, data science, and analytics community," so this nexus is right where SAS has played for years.