Abstract: Data mining plays a central role in knowledge discovery. It involves applying specific algorithms to extract patterns or rules from data sets in a particular representation. Many researchers in database and machine-learning fields are interested in this new research topic since it offers opportunities to discover useful information and important relevant patterns in large databases, thus helping decision-makers analyze data easily and make good decisions regarding the domains in question. Years of effort in data mining have produced a variety of efficient techniques and applications. In this speech, I would like to present some currently popular and interesting techniques developed in our research group. They include the integration of data mining with soft computing, privacy and ontology. The integration of data mining with soft computing can easily handle quantitative transactions and infer linguistic knowledge. Data mining with privacy can hide some transaction data or rules in the mining process for safety. Using ontology can take domain knowledge into consideration and improve the effectiveness of mining results. Besides, I will also introduce some interesting applications such as knowledge warehouse, web mining and on-shelf purchasing behavior mining.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Tzung-Pei Hong received his B.S. degree in chemical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1985, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science and information engineering from National Chiao-Tung University in 1992.
From 1987 to 1994, he was with the Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, where he was involved in applying techniques of parallel processing to artificial intelligence. He was an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science in Chung-Hua Polytechnic Institute from 1992 to 1994, and at the Department of Information Management in I-Shou University (originally Kaohsiung Polytechnic Institute) from 1994 to 1999. He was a professor in I-Shou University from 1999 to 2001. He was in charge of the whole computerization and library planning for National University of Kaohsiung in Preparation from 1997 to 2000 and served as the first director of the library and computer center in National University of Kaohsiung from 2000 to 2001, as the Dean of Academic Affairs from 2003 to 2006 and as the Vice President from 2007 to 2008. He is currently a distinguished professor at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering and at the Department of Electrical Engineering.
He has published more than 350 research papers in international/national journals and conferences and has planned more than fifty information systems. He is also the board member of more than thirty journals and the program committee member of more than one hundred and thirty conferences. His current research interests include parallel processing, machine learning, data mining, soft computing, management information systems, and www applications.
Dr. Hong is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE, the Chinese Fuzzy Systems Association, the Taiwanese Association for Artificial Intelligence, and the Institute of Information and Computing Machinery.