Record turnout for UC Center for Business Analytics workshop

The data science team at KNIME, the leading open source platform for data driven innovation, recently co-hosted a free sentiment analysis workshop at the University of Cincinnati’s Center for Business Analytics. A record number attended this year’s Nov. 27 workshop, which included a mix of regional analytics professionals and data scientists as well as business analytics graduate students from the Lindner College of Business.

The 65 attendees were given the opportunity to build their very own sentiment analysis application, step by step, using the KNIME analytics platform. The sentiment analysis is designed to help companies discover the potential hidden in data and determine what customers, users, contacts or others really think.

After an introduction to the most common techniques used for sentiment analysis and text mining, attendees split into groups, each one focusing on a different technique:

• Deep Learning: This group worked with KNIME’s visual Keras Integration to create a visual workflow completely code free.
• Machine Learning: This group used other machine learning techniques, such as R and Python, based on native KNIME nodes
• Lexicon Based: This group focused on a lexicon based approach for sentiment analysis.

According to Scott Fincher, a data scientist with KNIME, this was the second largest workshop the organization had ever given, only surpassed by a New York City event. “This event far exceeded expectations and is a testament to the size and interest of the analytics community in Cincinnati,” he says. “The UC Center for Business Analytics has a great facility and we will definitely include Cincinnati in our next tour.”

KNIME, the Konstanz Information Miner, is a free and open-source data analytics, reporting and integration platform. KNIME integrates various components for machine learning and data mining through its modular data pipelining concept. A graphical user interface and use of JDBC allows assembly of nodes blending different data sources, including preprocessing (ETL: Extraction, Transformation, Loading), for modeling, data analysis and visualization with only minimal programming. Since 2006, KNIME has been used in pharmaceutical research and is also used in other areas such as CRM, customer data analysis, business intelligence and financial data analysis.  Learn more at  www.knime.com.

The University of Cincinnati’s Center for Business Analytics is a corporate-academic partnership that promotes the use of data driven analytical methods.  The Center serves its’ members and the community through leadership development, presentation of three annual analytics events, professional analytics training using recognized expert instructors, connecting business organizations to Lindner College of Business MS Business Analytics and MS Information Systems students for research and projects, and managing analytics consulting projects using faculty and university resources. UC’s Center for Business Analytics is here to serve organizations-locally and nationally- to be best in class in analytics

At the Carl H. Lindner College of Business, we are committed to developing the next generation of business leaders. Through personalized career coaching and experiential learning, our students graduate with a competitive advantage in the workforce and are strongly positioned to address a multitude of today’s global business challenges. For more than 110 years, we’ve not only served as a catalyst for innovation and cutting-edge research, but our programs have also earned national acclaim in several academic areas. The best is yet to come in 2019, as we celebrate the grand opening of our new state-of-the-art building that promises to firmly position Lindner as one of the best business schools in the nation. We are Greater Cincinnati’s extraordinary college of business.