Tulane Engineering Forum

Chris Westphal

Mr. Westphal was born and raised in New York. He received his BS in Computer Science from the School of Engineering at Tulane University in 1986 and went on to do graduate work in the Washington DC area while working for the BDM Corporation. Mr. Westphal has since worked for several other area employers include IDA, Syscom (Logicon), ALTA and UIS. IN 1998 Mr. Westphal co-founded Visual Analytics Incorporation located in Bethesda, MD, where he retains the position of CEO. Mr. Westphal is responsible for establishing all corporate alliances, partnership and business ventures associated with the corporation. His primary work focus at Visual Analytics in one the identification of patterns and trends contained with the databases maintained by the company's client-base. Additionally, Mr. Westphal has authored numerous publications and several books including his most recent (co-authored) called Data Mining Solutions. Mr. Westphal has a strong technical background with specific emphasis in artificial intelligence, expert systems, intelligent interfaces, data mining and data visualization. He is often asked to speak or present at difference conferences and workshops.

Presentation Topic: Data Mining and Business Intelligence

By Chris Westphal

Summary

The competitiveness and complexity of the business world is forcing many companies to use enterprise business intelligence and data mining technologies to maximize their understanding of the data.

On-line services are increasing at an unprecedented rate and revolutionizing the way modern society conducts business - most business transactions can be done from the desktop with a click of a mouse. The volume of data collected electronically has grown inordinately with the demand of online services. The complexity and sheer volume of data makes it difficult to reveal underlying patterns and trends that are necessary to improve business operations. Advanced data mining systems provide data collection, management, and analysis to improve business intelligence functions. Revealing patterns in data is useful for making predictions or classifications about new data, explaining existing data, summarizing contents of large databases to assist in decision making, and visualizing data to assist in discovering patterns offering invaluable business intelligence to businesses.

This presentation addresses:

1. Current trends the data mining community.
2. How data mining trends affect business processes.
3. The influence of data mining on future operation of businesses.