The leading global data science conference, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, will open in four weeks in Shenzhen, China. In the following, Programme Committee Chairs Ravi Kumar of Google, USA, and Hannu Toivonen of University of Helsinki, Finland, share some key information about the organization of the conference.

First of all, this year’s conference was extremely competitive. A total of 727 papers were submitted for review. Each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members and the selection was made on the basis of discussion among the reviewers, a vice chair, and the program co-chairs.

71 regular papers (9.8% acceptance rate) and 72 short papers were accepted for presentation (giving a total acceptance rate of 19.7%).

In keeping with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in data mining, paper topics span numerous active and emerging areas including Location and Mobility, Graphs, Social Media, Spatio-Temporal Mining, Networks and Diffusion, Collaborative Methods and Factorization, Data Streams, Classification, Recommendations and Social Methods, Temporal Mining, Regression, Complex Data, Subspace Methods, Text Mining, Learning, Distances and Similarity, Anomalies and Applications, Multi-label Classification, Feature Selection, Marketing and Tweets.

We would like to thank the 41 Vice Chairs and 287 members of the Program Committee who provided insightful feedback to the authors and helped with this selection process.

For more information on the conference, including registration, program and travel info, see the conference web site at http://icdm2014.sfu.ca/home.html.