INTRODUCTION

Tutorials have become an integral part of KDD conferences. This is partly because of the interdisciplinary nature of data mining, but also because of the amount and speed of progress in the past decade. Tutorials are an effective way to educate conference attendees in specific topics and emerging sub-fields. Traditionally, KDD conferences have offered high quality tutorials on many aspects of data mining.

For KDD-2001, we are seeking proposals for 4 to 8 tutorials, each of 1.5 or 3 hours duration. A tutorial should ideally appeal to more than one sub-community of data mining, i.e., databases, machine learning and statistics. It should both educate conference attendees about a subfield and provide background necessary to understand technical advances. It may discuss novel data mining techniques, successful applications in data mining, and/or theme-oriented comprehensive surveys.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONS

Tutorial proposals should be submitted by March 7, 2001. Proposals should be submitted electronically to the Tutorials Chair (Tom Fawcett). Proposals may take the form of plain text, Postscript, PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, or some combination of these. Contact the Tutorials Chair if you wish to provide non-electronic supporting materials along with your proposal.

PROPOSAL DETAILS

Tutorial proposals should address the following issues:

• Basic information: Title, brief description, names and contact information for each tutor, the length of the proposed tutorial (1.5 or 3 hours).
• Audience: What is the intended audience for the tutorial, e.g., novice users of statistical techniques, expert researchers in text mining, or database administrators.
• Interest: Why is this topic important/interesting to the KDD community? Provide some informal evidence that people would attend. Evidence might include related workshops, conference sessions, mailing lists, discussions, papers, symposia, communities, etc.
• Coverage: How deep/broad is the proposed tutorial? How valuable would the tutorial be with the given scope?
• Background: What background will be required of the audience?

Enough materials should be included in the proposal to provide a sense of the scope and depth of the tutorial. The more details that can be provided, the better; up to and including actual overhead slides.

The proposal should also include some biographical information on each tutor (including WWW address, if applicable). This information should describe the qualifications of each presenter with respect to the tutorial's topic. For the proposed subject matter the tutor should have appropriate qualifications. On the other hand, the tutor should not focus mainly on his or her research results. A KDD tutorial is not a forum for promoting one's research or product. If, for certain parts of the tutorial, the material comes directly from the tutor's own research or product, please indicate this in the proposal.

IMPORTANT DATES