West Virginia University computer science students will conduct a data mining seminar at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7, in room G39 at the Engineering Sciences Building, Evansdale Campus.

The seminar is sponsored by WVU s Lane Department of Computer Science and Engineering. It is free and open to the public.

The seminar will provide an opportunity to meet the next generation of artificial-intelligence researchers and commercial data mining consultants, said Tim Menzies, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering.

In todays information-intensive age, there is no shortage of data. Getting useful knowledge from that data is often the challenge, Menzies said.

Computerized data mining methods allow researchers to extract small nuggets of knowledge from mountains of real-world data.

This years projects are particularly exciting,Menzies said.The students have been using data mining to explore a wide range of topicsincluding what makes a winning football team, how to identify personal music preferences, how to increase enrollment and retention at WVU , how to automatically analyze software engineering documents, and many others.

For more information this annual seminar, e-mail Tim Menzies at tim@menzies.us