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January 20, 2015

RapidMiner Opens Modern Analytics Platform to Academia Worldwide

BOSTON, Mass., Jan. 20 — RapidMiner, the industry’s easiest-to-use Modern Analytics platform, today introduced RapidMiner Academia — a program that provides free use of the commercial version of its platform to students, professors, researchers and other academics at non-profit educational institutions.

“‘Analytics. For Anyone.‘ is far more than our company tagline — it is part of our mission to help mitigate the shortfall of skilled analytic professionals — starting with empowering the next generation of data scientists,” said RapidMiner CEO Ingo Mierswa. McKinsey Global Institute estimates a shortage in the U.S. of up to 1.7M professionals with analytics expertise. “Giving back to the academic communities that helped ignite RapidMiner’s formation and success is at the very heart of this program,” Mierswa added.

Dr. Katharina Morik, head of the Artificial Intelligence Unit at the University of Dortmund noted, “Making RapidMiner available to academic communities puts a powerful modern analytics platform into the hands of professors to enrich their data analytics curriculum. Bringing RapidMiner into the student experience further prepares them for market entry as business analysts and data scientists of the future.”

Current Adoption

The RapidMiner user community in academia is strong with over 45,000 active users worldwide. Ranked by number of users: University of Nevada, Las Vegas; University of Arizona; University of Illinois; Technical University of Dortmund; and the University of Pittsburgh top the list of more than 3,000 universities using the Modern Analytics platform.

“In my lab, students love to analyze the big data from astrophysics with RapidMiner. They become data masters in astonishingly short time,” remarked Dr. Wolfgang Rhode, professor at the University of Dortmund.

Qualified Program Advantages

RapidMiner understands the challenges of today’s academic leaders and the demands upon institutions to produce more skilled analytic professionals than ever before. The RapidMiner Academia program was created to serve students, professors and researchers on many levels.

For Students & Professors

Benefits for students and professors include:

  • Taking advantage of the latest RapidMiner platform at no cost.
  • Sharing innovations with RapidMiner’s thriving open source community.
  • Leveraging RapidMiner’s repository of sample data and analytic processes.
  • Showcasing complex code underlying analytic models without coding.
  • Student certifications using RapidMiner exams as part of curriculum.
  • Additional support through the RapidMiner community at www.rapidminer.com/support.

Additionally, students and professors will learn:

  • How to design a fully-integrated analytics process from data ingestion through model deployment.
  • How to create analytic processes for Big Data, machine learning, text analytics and much more.
  • Best practices from the wisdom of RapidMiner’s 250K+ global users.

For Researchers

The program also considers the need for university researchers looking to unlock higher value from data in advanced research initiatives. Both unfunded and funded researchers can take advantage of the latest RapidMiner technology. Benefits include:

  • Unfunded researchers can use RapidMiner at no cost and get community support.
  • Funded researchers receive an 80 percent discount and get commercial support.
  • All researchers can opt-in to get certified on RapidMiner.

Additional benefits for researchers include:

  • Leveraging 1500+ analytics and 450+ data sources to create and deploy advanced analytics.
  • Supporting scientific publishing with export to PDF or EPS for inclusion into LaTeX and other formats.
  • Leveraging multiple compute engines including in-memory, in-Hadoop and in-stream.
  • Creating analytic processes for Big Data, machine learning, text analytics and much more.
  • Best practices from the wisdom of RapidMiner’s 250K+ global users.

For additional information on academic registration and eligibility for colleges and universities, visit www.rapidminer.com/academia.

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