Miner, Gary
Dr. Gary Miner received a B.S. from Hamline University, St. Paul, MN, with biology, chemistry, and education majors; an M.S. in zoology and population genetics from the University of Wyoming; and a Ph.D. in biochemical genetics from the University of Kansas as the recipient of a NASA pre-doctoral fellowship. He pursued additional National Institutes of Health postdoctoral studies at the U of Minnesota and U of Iowa eventually becoming immersed in the study of affective disorders and Alzheimer's disease.
In 1985, he and his wife, Dr. Linda Winters-Miner, founded the Familial Alzheimer's Disease Research Foundation, which became a leading force in organizing both local and international scientific meetings, bringing together all the leaders in the field of genetics of Alzheimer's from several countries, resulting in the first major book on the genetics of Alzheimer's disease. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Miner turned his data analysis interests to the business world, joining the team at StatSoft and deciding to specialize in data mining. He started developing what eventually became the Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications (co-authored with Drs. Robert A. Nisbet and John Elder), which received the 2009 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE). Their follow-up collaboration, Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications, also received a PROSE award in February of 2013. Overall, Dr. Miner's career has focused on medicine and health issues, so serving as the 'project director' for this current book on 'Predictive Analytics of Medicine - Healthcare Issues' fit his knowledge and skills perfectly.
Gary also serves as VP & Scientific Director of Healthcare Predictive Analytics Corp; as Merit Reviewer for PCORI (Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute) that awards grants for predictive analytics research into the comparative effectiveness and heterogeneous treatment effects of medical interventions including drugs among different genetic groups of patients; additionally he teaches on-line classes in 'Introduction to Predictive Analytics', 'Text Analytics', and 'Risk Analytics' for the University of California-Irvine, and other classes in medical predictive analytics for the University of California-San Diego; he spends most of his time in his primary role as Senior Analyst-Healthcare Applications Specialist for Dell Information Management Group, Dell Software (through Dell's acquisition of StatSoft in April 2014).
Elder, John
Dr. John Elder heads the United States' leading data mining consulting team, with offices in Charlottesville, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore, Maryland (www.datamininglab.com). Founded in 1995, Elder Research, Inc. focuses on investment, commercial, and security applications of advanced analytics, including text mining, image recognition, process optimization, cross-selling, biometrics, drug efficacy, credit scoring, market sector timing, and fraud detection. John obtained a B.S. and an M.E.E. in electrical engineering from Rice University and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from the University of Virginia, where he's an adjunct professor teaching Optimization or Data Mining. Prior to 16 years at ERI, he spent five years in aerospace defense consulting, four years heading research at an investment management firm, and two years in Rice's Computational & Applied Mathematics Department.
Hill, Thomas
Thomas Hill received his Vordiplom in psychology from Kiel University in Germany and earned an M.S. in industrial psychology and a Ph.D. in psychology and quantitative methods from the University of Kansas. He was associate professor (and then research professor) at the University of Tulsa from 1984 to 2009, where he taught data analysis and data mining courses. He also has been vice president for Research and Development and then Analytic Solutions at StatSoft Inc., where he has been involved for over 20 years in the development of data analysis, data and text mining algorithms, and the delivery of analytic solutions. Dr. Hill joined Dell through Dell's acquisition of StatSoft in April 2014, and he is currently the Executive Director for Analytics at Dell's Information Management Group.
Dr. Hill has received numerous academic grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Center for Innovation Management, the Electric Power Research Institute, and other institutions. He has completed diverse consulting projects with companies from practically all industries and has worked with the leading financial services, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, retailing, and other companies in the United States and internationally on identifying and refining effective data mining and predictive modeling solutions for diverse applications. Dr. Hill has published widely on innovative applications for data mining and predictive analytics. He is the author (with Paul Lewicki, 2005) of Statistics: Methods and Applications, the Electronic Statistics Textbook (a popular on-line resource on statistics and data mining), a co-author of Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-Structured Text Data Applications (2012); he is also a contributing author to the popular Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications (2009).
Fast, Andrew
Dr. Andrew Fast leads research in text mining and social network analysis at Elder Research. Dr. Fast graduated magna cum laude from Bethel University and earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There, his research focused on causal data mining and mining complex relational data such as social networks. At ERI, Andrew leads the development of new tools and algorithms for data and text mining for applications of capabilities assessment, fraud detection, and national security. Dr. Fast has published on an array of applications, including detecting securities fraud using the social network among brokers and understanding the structure of criminal and violent groups. Other publications cover modeling peer-to-peer music file sharing networks, understanding how collective classification works, and predicting playoff success of NFL head coaches (work featured on ESPN.com).
Delen, Dursun
Dr. Dursun Delen is the William S. Spears Chair in Business Administration and Associate Professor of Management Science and Information Systems in the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University (OSU). He received his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and management from OSU in 1997. Prior to his appointment as an assistant professor at OSU in 2001, he worked for a privately owned research and consultancy company, Knowledge Based Systems Inc., in College Station, Texas, as a research scientist for five years, during which he led a number of decision support and other information systems-related research projects funded by federal agencies, including DoD, NASA, NIST and DOE.
