(This article was originally published at Publishable Stuff, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
This year’s UseR! conference was held at the University of California in Los Angeles. Despite the great weather and a nearby beach, most of the conference was spent in front of projector screens in 18° c (64° f) rooms because there were so many interesting presentations and tutorials going on. I was lucky to present my R package Bayesian First Aid and the slides can be found here:
There was so much great stuff going on at UseR! and here follows a random sample:
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John Chambers on Interfaces, Efficiency and Big Data. One of the creators of S (the predecessor of R) talked about the history of R and exiting new developments such as Rcpp11. He was also kind enough to to sign my copy of S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics, the original S book from 1984 :)
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Yihui Xie the Knitr Ninja. Yihui held the most amazing presentation about how to be a Knitr ninja using only an R script and sound effects. The “anime sword” sound effect used by Yihui is just now available in the development version of
beeprand can be played by runningbeep("sword"). -
Romain François held both a tutorial and a presentation on the Rcpp11 package, a most convenient way of connecting R and C++.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel held a keynote on the topic of R, C++ and Rcpp, another convenient way of connecting R and C++. Do we see a theme here? He also talked about Docker which I never heard of before, which allows sort of light-weight virtual machines which can be easily built and distributed (this is my interpretation, which might be a bit off).
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Rstudio was otherwise running the show with great presentation with Winston Chang on ggvis, Joe Cheng on Shiny, J.J. Allaire and Kevin Ushey on Packrat - A Dependency Management System for R, Jeff Allen on The Next Generation of R Markdown and, of course, Hadley Wickham on dplyr: a grammar of data manipulation.
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Dieter De Mesmaeker presented a poster on Rdocumentation.org a really nice web-interface to the documentation of R.
All in all, a great conference! I’m already looking forward to next years UseR! conference which will be held at Aalborg University, not too far from where I live (at least compared to LA).
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