New Sci 25 May 1996: "Panning for data gold." Nowadays nearly every organization from supermarkets to the police can boast a vast mine of electronic data. Separating the gold from the dross is the real challenge. A growing band of computer scientists say they can dig out nuggets of 24-carat knowledge from huge mountains of database dross. They call themselves "data miners", and they are wielding some pretty impressive tools -- information theory, laws of probability, neural networks, tree induction, genetic algoritms, disjunctive normal form logic. But the impact of their efforts is anything but esoteric. By identifying potential new customers -- or ways of hanging on to existing ones -- this information is worth millions in extra revenue. And this is just the start, according to Usama Fayyad of Microsoft Research and co-editor of a new book on data mining. MIN_ers