The telecommunications industry has undergone tremendous changes in recent years. Advances in increased bandwidth capabilities and functionality of mobile devices, along with other factors have resulted in more sophisticated customers, highly competitive global markets, new “players”, and the emergence of new data-intensive services. All of these changes are leading to a search for new business models, partnerships, and open frameworks, which constitute a departure from the way the telecommunications industry had “traditionally” functioned. These factors combined with a tremendous increase in data (not just in traffic, but also in what is available to and generated by consumers in new services) are creating huge opportunities for KDD and tremendous challenges, not just from a business intelligence perspective, but also for user modeling applied to new business models and services. In this talk I will discuss how this landscape has evolved and its impact on KDD tasks, giving specific examples, describing technical challenges and pointing to the links from research to business applications in current and future settings.

Alejandro Jaimes is Senior Research Scientist at Telefónica Research in Madrid where he works closely with engineering teams on applied research solutions on data mining and user modeling from a human-centered perspective. Dr. Jaimes obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003 and has worked for IBM (USA, Japan), Fuji Xerox (Japan), Siemens (USA), AT&T Bell Labs (USA), and IDIAP Research Institute-EPFL (Swizterland). He holds several patents and has given numerous invited talks and participated in panels at several international conferences.