R Conferences on R Views

Summer Conferences!

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Summer is here, but it is not too late sign up for some summer conferences. The following short list promises interesting speakers, a wide range of topics and plenty of R content.

June (21 - 23) - The PSI 2021 conference is online and the Registration Portal is still open. Keynote speakers Alan Smith and Ian Bott from the Financial Times, and Janet Wittes, President of the WCG Statistics Collaborative, head the program.

June (21 - 24) - The Nonclinical Biostatistics Conference 2021 is virtual. Wendy Martinez of the Bureau of Labor statistics will present A Conversation About Data Ethics, Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame will deliver the keynote on Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails, and Di Cook and RStudio’s Carson Sievert will both talk in the Statistical Computational & Visualization Session. Registration is open.

July (1 to 2) - R for HTA Annual Workshop This online workshop from the Health Technology Assessment Consortium will be focused on R for trial and model-based cost-effectiveness analysis. Registration is open until June 30.

July (5 - 9) - useR!2021 looks like it is going to be a blockbuster of a conference. The keynote talks alone would be worth the price of admission. This exceptional lineup comprises a remarkably diverse, international group of long-time contributors, new faces, R developers, statisticians, journalists, and educators representing the global R community and speaking on a wide range of topics. I am very pleased to be presenting A little bit about RStudio on July 9 at UTC 9PM. Registration closes on June 25.

July (28 - 30) - Juliacon 2021 will be online and everywhere and Free! Long time R contributor Jan Vitek, Xiaoye Li of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Soumith Chintala of Facebook AI Research will be the keynote speakers. It is free but you need to Register.

Aug (8 - 12) - The JSM will be online. A keyword search using R and Shiny will turn up quite a few interesting talks. I am particularly looking forward to the talk Simulating Clinical Trials Data with Synthetic.Cdisc.Data and Respectables] by Gabe Becker and Adrian Waddell and the session on Tools to Enable the Use of R by the Biopharmaceutical Industry in a Regulatory Setting which contains five talks from members of the R Consortium’s R Validation Hub working group.

August (24 - 27) - R/Medicine 2021 is online and on track to repeat the last year’s international success. Registration is open. The deadline for submitting Abstracts is June 25. Workshops being planned include:

R/Med 101: Intro to R for Clinicians and Healthcare Professionals
R Markdown for Reproducible Research (R³)
SAS 2 R: Getting off the Island!
From Excel to R+REDcap
Spatial Analysis of Healthcare Data

Sept (6 to 9) - RSS 2021 International Conference The Royal Statistical Society conference hopes to be in person in Manchester, UK. The keynote speakers will be Tom Chivers and David Chivers, Melinda Mills, Jonty Rougier, Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen, Bin Yu, and Hadley Wickham. Submissions for poster presentations are currently open with a deadline of July 1. Registration is open with an early booking discount available until June 4.

2021 R Conferences

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It is not yet clear what lasting impact the Covid-19 pandemic will ultimately have on R conferences. We are still adapting to our inability to attend large events, and trying to make the best of the “silver lining” of virtual events which permit worldwide participation. The following is an attempt to list 2021 conferences that are likely to have interesting R content. I suspect that it is incomplete. If you know of an R Conference that is not mentioned, please add it to the comments section for this post.

Upcoming Events

NICAR 2021 (March 3 - 5), the Investigative Reporters & Editors Conference on data journalism should be well attended by data journalists using R for their everyday reporting.

CascadiaRConf 2021 (June 4 - 5), a jewel of a regional R conference for its first three years, was canceled in 2020. It is back this year as a virtual event. The Call for Presentations is open.

PHUSE US Connect 2021 (June 14 - 18) - PHUSE is a non-profit organization with the mission: “Sharing ideas, tools and standards around data, statistical and reporting technologies to advance the future of life sciences.” The conference which is focused on clinical data science is likely to have some interesting R content this year. The Call for Papers is open.

PSI 2021 Online (June 21 - 23) usually attracts six hundred or so statisticians from the pharmaceutical industry when the conference is held in person. PSI statisticians bring you Wonderful Wednesdays.

useR! 2021 (July 5 - 9) has an outstanding lineup of keynote speakers. The program is very likely to make US based attendees night-owls.

BioC 2021 (August 4 - 6) is the must attend event for anyone doing computational biology. Peruse the slides of past events to get a “rear view preview” of what to expect.

JSM 2021 Seattle (August 7 - 12), the mother of all statistics conferences, usually draws between 4,000 and 6,000 statisticians to in-person events. This organizers appear to be following some pretty optimistic Covid-19 vaccination rate models.

R/Medicine 2021 (August 27 - 29) has the dates, but no website yet. Don’t worry, the clinicians are big come from behind organizers. Last year’s conference was outstanding, and I expect an amazing event again this year.

R/Pharma 2021 organizers like to give R / Medicine organizers a head start, but a well placed source tells me that the conference will take place in Q3 or Q4. For the past three years, R/Pharma has been a bright star among R conferences where some of the best Shiny developers in the world meet and discuss their work.

EARL Conference 2021 (September 6 - 10), the premier R in industry event, will be online this year. The call for abstracts is already open.

NY R Conference 2021 is usually the perfect way to spend a couple of Manhattan Spring days. This year, the organizers are hoping for and in-person event in August or September if things go really well, but planning to surpass their spectacular 2020 virtual event if things don’t.

BIOP 2021 Rockville, MD (September 21 - 23) may be an in-person event. This workshop was originally an event for FDA statisticians but is now open to all statisticians interested in statistical practices for all areas regulated by the FDA.

noRth 2021 (September 29 30) is a regional conference out of the “Twin Cities” that is looking to virtually expand their reach within the R Community. Gabriela de Queiroz heads the list of confirmed speakers which includes new faces from IBM, Google, and the Federal Reserve.

Foss4g for OSGEO Buenos Aires (September 27 - October 2) is the annual conference of OSGeo, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. Given the prominence of R in geospatial analysis this is sure to be an R heavy event. The conference will be online.

PHUSE EU Connect 21 (November 15 - 19) See above.

R Government has a reasonable chance of pulling off an in-person event (at least for people in the DC area) sometime in December if the region gets a break from Covid.

Earlier Events

rstudio::global (January 21) - The talks from this unique 24 hour, worldwide event are on line.

Evidence Synthesis and Meta-Analysis in R - The talks from this conference and hackathon which attracted 514 participants from 26 countries are online here.

Some 2020 R Conferences

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

rstudio::conf kicked off the 2020 season for R conferences last week with record attendance somewhere north of twenty-one hundred. Session topics ranged from business to science, marketing to medicine and attracted R users with very varied backgrounds including DevOps professionals, data scientists, journalists, physicians, statisticians, R package developers, Shiny developers and more. Although it is true that the San Francisco Bay Area is home to a large R Community, and that a great deal of planning and promotion went into making rstudio::conf a success, I don’t think that the enthusiasm and energy that permeated the conference was a local phenomenon. I expect 2020 to be a good year for R conferences worldwide. Here is my short, somewhat eclectic, and by no means complete list of upcoming 2020 R events.

While not an R specific conference, the Conference on Statistical Practice (Sacramento, February 20 - 22) coming up soon will have some interesting R content. I am particularly looking forward to the talk by Songtao Wang on Thinking Statistically in Social Science and Humanities.
The NICAR Confererence produced by the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. (New Orleans, March 5 - 8) is a gathering of R and Python savvy journalists using R as an every day tool. Last year, I found the workshops and R training sessions to be outstanding.
The PAA Annual Meeting (Washington D.C., April 22 - 25) is an opportunity to meet demographers, economists public health professionals and sociologists using R.
The R Conference New York (May, 7 - 9), the re-branded NY R Conference of previous years, promises to be the major East Coast R event of the year with a diverse and talented roster of speakers.
The European R Users meeting, eRUM (May, 27 - 30) will be the first major European R conference of the season. Note that Sharon Machlis, Director of Data & Analytics at IDG Communications will be one of the keynote speakers. 2020 may be the year that journalism captures the attention of the R Community.
The Symposium on Data Science & Statistics, SDSS, (Pittsburgh, June 3 - 6) has become one of my favorite statistics conferences. Smaller and more manageable than the JSM, talks are sure to be infused with R content. Note that there will be a session on Data Journalism and Visualization.
Now in its twelfth year, R / Finance (Chicago, June 5 - 6) has set the bar for small, single-session, collegial, technical R conferences. Focusing on Financial applications with a serious dose of advanced time series applications, R / Finance provides the opportunity to interact with professionals who put their money on R.
Always the pivotal event of the R Community, useR! 2020 (St. Louis, July 7 -10) is sure to be a great event and a good time. The final program has not been published (Note that the Call for papers is still open.), but the tutorial sessions alone indicate that useR! 2020 be an outstanding educational opportunity.
The useR! 2020 European Hub Conference (Munich, July 7 - 10) will feature live talks as well as video streaming sessions from useR! 2020 in St. Louis. This innovative format promises to be an important event in its own right and a satisfying community experience.
The JSM (Philadelphia, August 1 - 6), the mother of all statistical conferences, is expecting more than 6,500 attendees from 52 countries. This is an event you have to train for, but with some preparation and a little planning the JSM can be an opportunity to interact with statisticians who depend on the deep statistical knowledge embedded in R.
The Bioconductor Conference, BioC 2020, the event where Software and Biology Connect (Boston, July 29 - 30) is the premier conference for R and Genomics. If you have an interest in learning about cutting edge statistical applications using the big data of modern Biology, this the conference to attend.
The Why R? 2020 Conference (Warsaw, August 27 - 30) is not only positioned to be the third significant European R conference of the year, the organizers have developed an ambitious and innovative strategy of supporting a number of satellite pre-meetings that stretch from Warsaw to Limerick and South Africa. I think this is a fantastic community initiative that represents a commitment to build the R Community in under served areas.

There is no website yet, but it is breaking news that R / Medicine 2020 will be held in Philadelphia from August 27th to 29th. In its third year, R / Medicine is establishing itself as the R conference for physicians seeking to advance clinical practice with R fueled data science.
The LatinR 2020 Conference (Montevideo, October 7 - 9) will be a major South American event. The Call for papers is open. Look here for previous programs.
The BiocAsia 2020 Conference (Beijing, October 17 - 18), the yearly Asian Bioconductor event, has confirmed that Robert Gentleman will be speaking.

Other conferences on my radar are:
* The R Conference Dublin (June)
* The CascadiaRConf (Eugene, OR)
* R / Pharma which will most likely be held at Harvard University in August.
* BioCEurope which will likely be held in December.

Please let me know what upcoming conferences I may have missed by adding them to the comments section of this post.

On Meeting Data Journalists

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“I’d rather do data than date”. I overheard this while eavesdropping on a conversation among three female data journalists while waiting for an elevator at the IRE-CAR (Investigative Reporters and Editors - Computer-Assisted Reporting) conference last month. I would like to think the remark was overloaded with hyperbole, but maybe not. Most of the attendees as this conference were motivated, tenacious, and highly skilled data hounds, the kind of investigative journalists who pry information from government databases through persistent requests, legal leverage, and SQL expertise.

This was my first CAR conference, and I was very impressed by the mission-driven enthusiasm with which the speakers, panelists, and attendees focused on data as an essential tool for the pursuit of the truth. I was impressed, but not surprised, to find this passion for data. Journalists have been sifting through data to find the truth since at least the early twentieth century when social work, academic social science, and journalism were all in the same primeval soup¹. The modern tradition of computer-assisted data journalism dates at least as far back as Philip Meyer’s coverage of the Detroit Riots, his 1973 book Precision Journalism, and subsequent collaboration with Donald Bartlet and James Steele examining patterns in 1970’s Philadelphia criminal conviction sentences². I mention all this to emphasize that data journalism is not just a trendy offshoot of data science. In fact, it might be the other way around! Data scientists probably owe as much to data journalists as they do to statisticians.

The number of packed workshops and talks on data wrangling and visualization far exceeded my expectations. I did expect some R content. (I saw the recent BBC post, and New York Times R-based visualizations are a daily part of my news consumption.) But, there were over 15 R-related sessions on the schedule, along with at least as many sessions devoted to Python, SQL, JavaScript, D3, and other programming tools. Moreover, the fact that several featured technical workshops were repeated over multiple days indicated that the conference organizers expected the data journalists to want to dig into the details of all these technologies.

You can get a flavor for the technology presentations by looking into the tip sheets that are available for many of these sessions. There is a wealth of information buried here, well worth a couple of hours of exploration. For example, see Peter Aldhous’ talk Text mining in R with tidytext,

Andrew Ba Tran’s Mapping with R, and the panel discussion How and why to make your data analysis reproducible, and Sharon Machlis’ video series: Do More with R.

A session on statistical inference that I very much enjoyed was Jevin West’s talk Calling bullshit: Data reasoning in a digital world. There is no tip sheet for the talk, but the website for the course that he teaches at the University of Washington with his colleague Carl Bergstrom contains voluminous material. Something like this course ought to be included in every statistics and data science syllabus. In addition to discussing the standard topics, such as attributing cause to correlation and deconstructing misleading visualizations, it also presents several up-to-date cautionary tales: for example, have a look at the case study Criminal Machine Learning.

Some additional tip sheets that I found illuminating for what they reveal about the types of data sources that data journalists seek out are: Tracking dark money tips, 2020 Census Reporting Mistakes, Tips on Finding Nonprofit Data, and Before you ever begin your analysis.

If you are a data journalist, or a data journalist in training, or really anyone new to R, and are looking for a fast on-ramp to becoming productive at data wrangling and creating visualizations, I highly recommend Sharon Machilis book Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism and Andrew Ba Tran’s tutorial, R For Journalists. Both of these resources are unusual in that they provide up-to-date, tidyverse-based, GitHub-aware introductions to R, stressing data acquisition, manipulation, reporting, and graphing without the burden of having to simultaneously take an introductory course in statistics.

Finally, thanks to Andrew, here is a list of R-fluent journalists whom you may want to follow on Twitter:

¹C.W. Anderson. Apostoles of Certainty: Oxford University Press 2018. Chapter 2

² Data Journalism, Wikipedia

2018 R Conferences

Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

rstudio::conf 2018 and the New York R Conference are both behind us, but we are rushing headlong into the season for conferences focused on the R Language and its applications.

The European R Users Meeting (eRum) begins this coming Monday, May 14th, in Budapest with three days of workshops and talks. Headlined by R Core member Martin Mächler and fellow keynote speakers Achim Zeileis, Nathalie Villa-Vialaneix, Stefano Maria Iacus, and Roger Bivand, the program features an outstanding array of accomplished speakers including RStudio’s own Barbara Borges Ribeiro, Andrie de Vries, and Lionel Henry.

Second only to useR! in longevity, the tenth consecutive R / Finance will be held in Chicago on June 1st and 2nd. Keynote speakers Norm Matloff, J.J. Allaire, and Li Deng head a strong program. Produced by the same committed crew of Chicago quants with the unwavering support of UIC, R / Finance is the epitome of a small, tightly focused, single-track R conference. If you are interested in the quantitative side of Finance, there is no better place to network.

The relatively new CascadiaRConf will feature keynote speakers Alison Hill and Kara Woo in a one-day event on June 2nd in Portland, OR that promises to be good time with several hands-on workshops.

A SatRday mini-conference will be held in Cardiff on June 23rd. Stephanie Locke, Heather Turner, and Maelle Salmon will be leading the event. The recent conference in Capetown appears to have been a great day for working with R, and a lot of fun. I expect that Cardiff will also be a blast.

Why R? July 2nd through 5th in Wrocław, Poland is an ambitious undertaking with five keynote speakers (Bernd Bischl, Thomas Petzoldt, Leon Eyrich Jessen, Tomasz Niedzielski, and Maciej Eder), a hackathon, and several “pre-meetings” spread across Poland, Germany, and Denmark. I expect this to be a top-tier series of events.

R in Montreal will be held from July 4th through 6th. Pleanary speakers Julie Josse, Arun Srinivasan, and Daniel Stubbs will headline the program.

The 14th useR! conference, the first to happen in the Southern Hemisphere, will be held in Brisbane, Australia from July 10th through the 13th. The mother of all R conferences, useR! attracts R afficianados from around the globe and provides a window to what is au courant in the R universe. Keynote speakers Jenny Bryan, Steph De Silva, Heike Hofmann, Thomas Lin Pedersen, Roger Peng, and Bill Venables head the program. The tutorials, always a major attraction at useR! conferences, will take place over two days.

Insurance Data Science, the direct successor to the series of R in Insurance conference will be held in London on July 16th. Although renamed, and presumably refocused, the program for the conference still indicates quite a bit of R content. Garth Peters and Eric Novic will deliver the keynotes.

BioC 2018, the flagship conference for the BioConductor project and a major event in the computational genomics world, will be held from July 25 through the 27th at Victoria University, Toronto. The program is still coming together, but confirmed speakers include Brenda Andrews, Benjamine Haibe-Kains, Elana Fertig, Charlotte Sonneson, Michael Hoffman, and Tim Hughes.

The Latin American R/BioConductor Developers Workshop will be held between July 30th and August 3rd at the center for Genomic Sciences in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Invited speakers include Martin Morgan and Heather Turner. The workshop is aimed at students and researchers, with a goal of teaching participants the principles of reproducible data science through the development of R/Bioconductor packages.

Two brand-new conferences directly modeled on the R / Finance experience will make their debuts this year. R / Pharma, a conference devoted to the use of R for reproducible research, regulatory compliance and validation, safety monitoring, clinical trials, drug discovery, R&D, PK/PD/pharmacometrics, genomics, and diagnostics in the pharmaceutical industry will be held on August 15th and 16th at Harvard University. This will be a small, collegial gathering limited to 150 attendees; it will undoubtedly sell out soon after registration opens.

R / Medicine, which will focus on the use of R in medical research and clinical practice, with talks addressing Phase I clinical trial design; the analysis and visualization of clinical trial data, patient records, and genetic data; personalized medicine; and reproducible research, will take place in New Haven, CT on September 7th and 8th. This will also be a small gathering that is likely to sell out soon after registration opens.

LatinR, which will focus on the use of R in R&D, will be held at th University of Palermo in Buenos Aires on September 4th and 5th. Keynote speakers Jenny Bryan and Walter Sosa Escudero will head the program.

The last R conference on my radar for the 2018 season, the enterprise-focused EARL (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) Conference, will take place in London from September 11th through the 13th. Edwin Dunn and Garrett Grolemund will deliver the keynotes, and the list of speakers comprises an impressive roster of industrial-strength R users. This is clearly the event for data scientists looking to put R into production.

Looking Forward to R/Finance 2017

Fri, 12 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

R / Finance 2017 starts next Friday, and once again, I am excited about going. It’s true that there are quite a few fun and informative R gatherings these days, but R / Finance is a “big deal” because it is the “real deal”. Finance has been, and remains, one of the driving applications underlying the R language. (A glance at the CRAN Task Views for Finance and Time Series will give you an idea of the depth and extent of the work done in this area since the early days of R.) But beyond that, there is an intensity about people who write algorithms under time pressure with money on the line. R / Finance provides a window to this world by running a small, focused, single-track conference where a third of the attendees are going to be experts in the field, and the speakers include people whose professional lives either shaped the practice of financial analytics or are influencing the direction of R.

Keynote speaker, David DeMers arrived early enough at the Prediction Company, the legendary analytics quant firm founded by Doyne Farmer and the other Chaos Theory geniuses immortalized in The Eudaemonic Pie, to get his own paragraph in Thomas Bass’ follow-up read: The Predictors.

Arriving at the same time [1995] as Stephen [Pope] is the company’s new researcher, David DeMers, a Falstaffian character with a walrus mustache, a thatch of gray hair parted in the middle, and the useful skills of a professional bridge player. Given to wearing wild, floral-print surfer jammies and T-shirts saying, “I am a professional. Do not try this at home,” DeMers shares an office with William [Finnoff], where his round, cherubic face is the perfect antidote to William’s Germanic angst. Born in 1954 into a family of French Canadian ancestry, DeMers, the son of an aerospace engineer, has a B.S. from Stanford in math. He has an M.B.A. from the University of California at Los Angles. He has another degree from UCLA in law. And, finally he has a Ph.D. in computer science from UC San Diego, where he used neural networks to control robot arms. DeMers’s fist assignment at the Prediction Company is to plug the oil leak. The prices at which their contracts are being traded diverge dramatically from the prices quoted over the satellite feed. . .

Szilard Pafka (No-Bullshit Data Science), the conference’s other keynote speaker, balances DeMers’ quant history with a heavy dose of R reality. Szilard is a no-nonsense, data-driven kind of guy with little tolerance for the hype that drives much of the Big Data, data science marketing machine. Szilard has been a force in the R Community, organizing meetups, speaking, and spending a good bit of his free time benchmarking R and other technologies.

Here is a video of Szilard speaking last year at useR!.

Other speakers of note include David Smith, Bryan Lewis, Thomas Harte, Seoyoung Kim, who spoke recently at the Bay Aeea useR Group, and RStudio’s own Jonathan Regenstein, who has been setting the standard for blogging about R and Finance. Jonathan provides the nuts and bolts details on how to use the latest R tools with data from multiple sources to generate insight and share it in reproducible workflows. If you are looking to get started with using R for Finance or just want to prep for the R / Finance conference, you can’t do any better than working through the posts in Jonathan’s Reproducible Finance with R series.