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EBTIC Researcher wins Second Place at International Data Mining Competition

September 7, 2018

Dr. Dymitr Ruta Chief Researcher at the Etisalat BT Innovation Center (EBTIC) which is operated in partnership with Khalifa University recently came in 2nd at the International AAIA’14 Data Mining Competition in Warsaw Poland. The competition was organised within the framework of the 9th International Symposium on Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. Dr. Ruta competed against 116 teams of researchers from around the world who submitted a total 1300 competitive solutions in answer to the task posed by the judges.

The task involved the extraction of useful knowledge from fire incident reports obtained by the State Fire Service in Poland. Almost 12 000 risk factors extracted from nearly 260 000 fire reports from the city of Warsaw and its surroundings were provided to the contestants so that they could build a model that would predict the occurrence of serious injuries and casualties among civilians children and firefighters. The objective was to select several risk factors that would deliver the highest accuracy for detecting human injuries and casualties using the Naïve Bayes model. The Naive Bayes model is a popular method of text categorization which addresses the problem of judging documents as belonging to one category or the other (such as spam or legitimate sports or politics etc.) with word frequencies as one of the main features.

Dr. Ruta used his machine learning skills and his ability to process Big Data in order to deliver a very compact model using just 71 factors that achieved a predictive accuracy of 96% just 0.2% off the winning model.

“This is a great achievement for EBTIC and demonstrates its capabilities and expertise in predictive analytics using big data which can be reused for other similar cognitive tasks that require massive amounts of data ” said Prof. Nader Azarmi Director of EBTIC. “EBTIC researchers are world class in their fields and are responsible for filing a large number of patents filed in the UAE. Dr. Ruta’s 2nd place win in this highly contested international competition shows how dedicated our researchers are.”