I attended KDD this year. The conference has always had a strong grounding in what works based on the KDDcup, but it has developed a halo of workshops on various subjects. It seems that KDD has become a place where the economy meets machine learning in a stronger sense than many other conferences.

There were several papers that other people might like to take a look at.

KDD also experimented this year with crowdvine which was interesting. Compared to Mark Reid‘s efforts with ICML, they managed to get substantially more participation. There seemed to be two reasons: the conference organizers more deeply integrated and encouraged the use of crowdvine, and crowdvine has certain handy additional uses—you can create your own personal schedule for instance, which incidentally provides some vague global notion of the popularity of various papers. The biggest drawback I found was that the papers themselves were not integrated into the website.