Albrecht Zimmermann - Scientific Data Mining

Mission statement

This web site has two purposes:

1. To act as a go to page ‐ collecting my publications, presentations, implementations ‐ that doesn't have to change when I move to a new institution
2. To support my main goal in research: to get towards Scientific Data Mining

I feel I need to add a few words on the latter point because the phrase has already been used before.

When I use the qualifier "scientific", I do not mean Data Mining that is done within the context of academic research as opposed to a business context. I find both application fields equally interesting and important and the current research practive in Data Mining does both a disservice, in my opinion.

I also do not mean Data Mining that is only performed on data that have been generated in a scientific context. The difference to the preceding paragraph may not be obvious but mining scientific data and using the results for business purposes would be possible, and scientific data might be cleaner/easier to handle than data collected in a business context.

The goal I would like to achieve instead consists of performing Data Mining research itself scientifically since this is something we are currently not doing. This will include reproducing published results, verifying the output of Data Mining methods, periodically re-evaluating existing methods, and giving guarantees and practical guidance to Data Mining users of all kinds. Or, as I like to call it

It would be a bit much to call it a "research program" as long as it involves only one person but maybe I can convince others.

Current professional status

I currently hold the position of Maître de conférences (maps roughly to associate professor according to what I've found) at the University of Caen - Normandie. Research-wise I take part in the activities of the group CoDaG, which is in turn part of the research lab GREYC.

I was part of the LIRIS lab at INSA Lyon, France, between February 2nd, 2014 and August 31st, 2015.

Until the end of October 2013, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the Computer Science department of the Catholic University Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Belgium, in the Machine Learning group which is in turn a subgroup of the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence (DTAI) group.

I began my doctoral studies at the Computer Science Department of the University Freiburg, Germany. My PhD thesis was on "Mining Sets of Patterns", a topic that grew out of replacing heuristic local pattern mining components, which made me realize that many existing techniques for classification, feature construction, and clustering can be considered to consist of such a local pattern step as well as a pattern set mining step (either as post-processing or as outer loop).

Short CV - status November 2023

Google Scholar profile

I've just made an Open Review profile

My Orcid ID is 0000-0002-8319-7456

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