The following article is the summary of a presentation given by the author at the Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC, on the occasion of a joint event between the Office of Science & Technology (OST) and the DC Chapter of the Association of Austrian Scientists and Scholars in North America (ASciNA) on June 18, 2008.

We are living in an increasingly data-driven world. Companies are amassing larger and larger data repositories about their customers in the form of loyalty cards, cookies, or crawlers. This puts pressure on decision makers to extract new and actionable knowledge from that data. Data Mining is a relatively young discipline that has roots in Statistics, Machine Learning, and Visualization and its goal is the discovery of interesting (i.e., non-trivial, previously unknown, and potentially useful) knowledge from huge amounts of data.