R Consortium

Sergio García Mora, founder and organizer of the R4HR Club de R para RRHH, gives us a deep dive into the success of the R community in Buenos Aires, a community that was born in the middle of the pandemic and that three years after its foundation has expanded throughout Argentina and now reaching a global audience with their online webinars. Sergio also describes his first experience with R and the great benefits that the language has brought to the development of his work as a Human Resources specialist.

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Why did you personally get interested in learning R? How do you use it in your work? What do you do when you’re not programming?

SG: My interest in R was a coincidence. Years ago I found a master’s degree in Data Science, in which several professors proposed the use of licensed tools to solve certain exercises. Most of my classmates opted to use R. They also used Python, although to a lesser extent. Without real guidance, I just dug deeper into learning R. At first, it was difficult and I preferred to use other programs such as RapidMiner with drag-and-drop modules, which I thought did the job in a simplified way, although the reality was that in the long run, it was more complicated, since in real life I had to make many changes, such as adding filters or correcting certain categories. Later I realized that if I learned to code, the task became really simple.

In 2020 was when my knowledge of the language increased and got better because in that year I started working in a BI (Business Intelligence) company and as a consultant mainly interested in the Human Resources area, I noticed that if I applied R for data analysis, I could be more competitive and contribute with something different to the team.

For me R is a language with a simple and agile syntax, which does not have many restrictions in the formality of the code, likewise, the community, in general, is made up of very supportive and open people, always willing to share knowledge, that is why I have chosen R over other programming languages and the use I give it in my work has given excellent results.

In the work environment, I could divide the use of R in two ways, the complex part and the simple and repetitive part. On the complex side, I focus on doing a lot of data transformations and more sophisticated statistical analysis. For example, I am currently working on a geospatial analysis project, where I am looking at how far employees travel to different work locations. 

On the other hand, the simple part involves the application of the language for more mundane things, such as reporting completion rates of some mandatory trainings where I simply generate a script, update the data source if necessary, and get to the execution, ready to use.

What is the R community like in Buenos Aires, Argentina? What was most surprising to you about the community?

SG: Something I have noticed about the R community in Buenos Aires is that it is very decentralized, by this I mean that the organizing group is all over the place. We have two people from Buenos Aires, one in Córdoba and others in Corrientes, in spite of this, there is an incredible mix of enthusiasm, intelligence, and a sense of humor. This definitely makes all the phases of the projects enjoyable.

Who comes to these meetups? What industries do you see more in Buenos Aires?

SG: The industries we see in Buenos Aires are in the public and private sectors. Our work with the public sector is mainly based on solving problems involving the handling of large volumes of data and files, while the private sector is more focused on career development in the world of people analytics.

How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members? What techniques (Github, zoom, other) have you used to connect and collaborate with members? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?

SG: It is important to mention that our community was born in COVID times, therefore, from our beginnings, all communication has been through platforms such as Zoom and other asynchronous channels including Slack and Telegram. We also make use of certain social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Despite the great challenges that the pandemic brought with it, I believe that the community was resilient enough, and the benefits we gained from this situation would not have been the same as they would have been in person. Thanks to this, we currently have the presence of people from different countries and provinces, who are an active part of the community and not just listeners of a talk. 

Our reach would not have been the same without the use of these tools. Therefore, for logistical reasons, we will continue to use them to communicate remotely, especially in a city as big as Buenos Aires.

What trends do you see in R language over the next year?

SG: The development of Quarto for everything to do with reporting and the adoption of R in Human Resources, from my point of view, is the big trend for this year.

On a personal note, and observing my field of work, it has happened to me that my clients ask me for reports and delivered them in R through Markdown, but later they ask me to present the work in other formats, such as Excel or PowerPoint, so a possible change for this could be to look for resources to develop the work in R in Markdown and output it directly to Office.

What is your favorite R event that you have attended? From a small meetup to a big conference!

SG: Outside of the events that we organize, I really like the R Ladies groups from LATAM and R in Baires. I also consume offline content by watching conferences on a topic that interests me, such as Posit or R User to name a few.

Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium, do you have a favorite project? Why is it your favorite?

SG: Definitely everything that has to do with GapAnalysis is of great interest to me, as this kind of analysis allows me to differentiate between what is really going on or whether it is just presumption, in a manner of speaking.

Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite? Why is it your favorite?

SG: My favorites are, as I mentioned before, R Ladies and I would add R Business and R Repositories, which I also think are amazing.

When is your next event? What are your plans for the group for the coming year? Please give details!

SG: We will keep doing our HR Salary Survey, we expect to develop a Shiny app soon. Regarding events, we do not have anything confirmed yet, but it is possible that we will have an interview with the people from Data Genero, on the other hand, as I teach at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA), we are seeing if we can do a hybrid meeting with the community in the second half of March.

Finally, I would like to take this space to invite anyone who wants to join us and wants to work with the community, you are always welcome!

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

R is turning 23 this year on February 28/29th! R 1.0.0 was first released on February 29, 2000, implementing a dialect of the language S, which was developed at Bell Laboratories by John Chambers. Initially, R was written by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, who were Senior Lecturers at the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. In addition, a large group of individuals has contributed to R by testing and sending reports. 

The CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) repository has been a powerhouse for contributors to add valuable R packages to the open source ecosystem.  Currently, the CRAN package repository features 19,234 available packages!

The latest release (2022-10-31, Innocent and Trusting) is here: R-4.2.2.tar.gz, read what’s new in the latest version.

At-A-Glance Major milestones

• 1993: Research project starts in Auckland, NZ  
• 1995: R released as open source software
• 1997: R core group formed
• 1997: CRAN founded
• 2000: R 1.0.0 released (February 29) 
• 2003: R Foundation founded
• 2004: First international user conference in Vienna
• 2009: The R Journal starts publication
• 2012: R-Ladies founded
• 2015: R Consortium founded
• 2016: R-Ladies Global founded, supported by R Consortium
• 2022: The R Consortium Submissions Working Group successfully submits test submission package with a Shiny component to FDA
• 2022: R 4.2.2 released

The R Consortium is committed to promoting and supporting the R language and community through the development of open-source software, education, and collaboration. The R Community is filled with individuals who continue to contribute and improve the language for many years to come! Here are some celebratory quotes from members of the R Community. 📣

Join us in celebrating the 23rd birthday of R! 🎉

The R Consortium recently talked to Agatha Rodrigues of the R-Ladies Vitória. Agatha talked about the growing R community in Vitória and stressed the importance of further promoting the use of R. She also shared her hopes to further the use of R in public policy and discussed her work with the Brazilian Obstetric Observatory during the pandemic.

Agatha works at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Sao Paulo University Medical School and is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics at the Federal University of Espirito Santo. She got her Bachelor’s in Statistics from the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil. She got her MS and Ph.D. degrees in Statistics from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. 

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What is the R community like in Vitória? Can you name a few industries using R in Vitória?

The R community in Vitória is growing and R is being used in academia and industry. In the health sector, R is being used for data analysis. An example is the Brazilian Obstetric Observatory (OOBr): I am OOBr Principal Investigator, and this project is R Ladies Vitoria’s partner. We use R for analyzing data regarding the maternal population during the current pandemic. 

In Vitória, people who study statistics use R, but people who come from other data science areas, for example, computer science, use Python. There are some industries and companies using R like PicPay, Autoglass, and Aguia Branca. 

I feel that there is a need to promote and incentivize the use of R in Vitória. Even though there are industries and companies using R in Vitória, there’s definitely room for improvement. 

How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

Initially, it was very difficult for us as we were really comfortable hosting in-person events. Having to shift all our meetings online was confusing in the beginning. As we continued, we got accustomed to online meetings and online discussion forums. We have now developed a delightful sense of community online where women are helping each other with R.

In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?  

We used Zoom and Google Meet for our online events and Slack and WhatsApp for discussions and also for sharing different job opportunities. There is a repository for our group on GitHub. We uploaded our recorded sessions to the YouTube Channel for the Obstetric Observatory. We don’t have a dedicated YouTube channel for our group.

I think we will continue using these technologies in the future as well because they actually made our meetings more inclusive for women outside of Vitória. We would also like to host hybrid events.

Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic? Why was it so interesting? 

In September 2022 we hosted an event Web Scraping in R presented by Ornella Scardua and it was really interesting. We talked about how you can collect data from the internet. Another interesting presentation was about Machine Learning in R. It was particularly interesting because it cleared the misconception for those that do not currently use R for Machine Learning.

Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?

An example of data journalism can be our work with the Brazilian Obstetric Observatory. During the pandemic, we analyzed the data for the maternal population that was hospitalized with COVID-19. We developed a shiny app to present this data. This led to pregnant and postpartum women being made a priority group for vaccination. 

Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium, do you have a favorite project? Why is it your favorite?

I really liked Setting up an R-Girls-Schools Network. I love the idea that we can teach girls R from school. deposits: Deposit Research Data Anywhere is another interesting project, as it is very important to have a resource to deposit your research data. 

Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite? Why is it your favorite?

I really like the R/Business active working group as it is an area that I personally find interesting and would love to learn more about. 

When is your next event? Please give details!

Our next event is a workshop about using Python in R. In Vitória, the Python community and the R community are two important communities and we want people to learn how they can use a combination of these languages for their work. We have not finalized the date yet but all information will be available on our Meetup.

What are your plans for your group for the next year?

For the next year, we would like to have more events regarding the use of R for public policies. I think R can be an important tool for analyzing public data to facilitate decision-makers in devising better policies. We would love to promote the use of R for public policy in Brazil!

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

Carlos Ortega, organizer of Grupo de Usuarios de R de Madrid (Madrid useR Group), shares about the thriving community in Madrid, Spain. Carlos highlights the group’s loyal members and the richness of knowledge being shared in their Meetups. Carlos also shares about his involvement in Spain and the National R Congress for R users. The Madrid R Users have also been collaborating with educational institutions for facilities and spaces for dialogue surrounding its member’s work using the R language.

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Why did you personally get interested in learning R? How do you use it in your work?

I started using S-Plus at ATT, we had a relationship with the Bell-Labs group that created it and in fact, John Chamber’s group created different libraries for manufacturing process analysis. In the late 1990s in our plant, we were using S-Plus intensively for multiple analyses. To witness the birth and growth of R was spectacular. I still have some of Professor Ripley’s mail exchanged on the R-Help list. Soon after I found out about the existence of R-Help-es (the Spanish R help list) that’s when those of us who participated regularly decided to set up an R group in Madrid. That’s how Grupo de Usuarios de R de Madrid was born and it has exponentially grown since. The Spanish association of R users was also created at the same time.

What is the R community like in Madrid, Spain and how has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

We have a very loyal number of people that are part of the community. I am talking about 6 to 10 people. But, there are around 30-40 people that are currently attending our meet-ups both virtually and lower in-person. That can also be a result of the big change that came after the Pandemic. Before that, there were several meetings in different places and many people did not have time to attend. 

With the Pandemic, we started to host online meetings on the Zoom platform, and we stopped physical meetups in the meantime. Now, more people from Latin America are attending our meetings every month. We have a permanent place at the Faculty of Statistical Studies in Madrid; it is a good place to host because we have available classrooms and enough materials for our events. Another collaboration that we have is with the University of Distant Education in Spain. We also have a permanent place there, which is great. It is amazing that we started getting more and more people, not only from Madrid but around the world.

What is your favorite R event you have attended?

Every year the National Congress of R users is held in Spain. This year it was held in Cordoba and I was able to participate in a workshop. Congress in Córdoba was a very nice event at a great venue. The event lasted three days but I stayed one day. It was an R User international event and although I couldn’t stay the whole event, I enjoyed it a lot. It was the first physical event after a long time, and it was very nice to see old friends and establish new friendships.

What is your favorite project from the R Consortium?

R Ladies is very important for everyone. We have a good relationship with R Ladies although we are not having many meetings together. But I am hoping to explore co-hosting events together in the near future. Another one is the R Consortium RUGS funding that has been created for the Meetups and big events. Although it is not very expensive to have these events, we’ve received funding from the R Consortium. We are very well funded and that is very important for the growth of our group.

When is your next event? What are your plans for the group for the coming year? Please give details!

Recently we were fortunate to have Edgar Ruiz (RStudio) who spoke to us about “sparklyr”. For this new year, in January and February, we have already scheduled the presentations. And we are sure that throughout the year, we will have as much talent from Spain as from other countries.

We try to meet up each last Thursday of every month. We also have an in-person event, we will be showing a new package (targets) so you can make ETLs and orchestrate changes of different kinds. I will also present myself if I have the chance.

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

Dr. Heather Turner of the Warwick R User Group (also on Twitter) recently talked to the R Consortium about the group’s struggle to stay active amid the pandemic. With the pandemic and changes in the organizing team, the group took a hiatus for a few years. They made a comeback at the end of 2021 and are currently alternating between in-person and online events. She also shared the group’s plans to host hybrid events in the future.

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How did you get introduced to R? How do you use R in your work?

I started learning R during my Ph.D. as I needed it for my studies and research. Then during my postdoc, I worked to create an R package, and that’s when I started to learn more about software development. At that stage, I moved a bit more into statistical programming rather than statistics. And that’s what I have been doing since in academia, industry, and as a freelancer. 

About a year and a half ago, I started a 5-year fellowship working on Sustainability and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in the R project. The aim is to foster a broader and more diverse community of contributors to R, particularly the base packages maintained by the R Core Team. So while I do use R in my work, I am involved in a lot of community engagement activities encouraging other people to use R and to contribute back to the project. Anyone interested in contributing should visit contributor.r-project.org to find out how to get involved.

What is the R community like in the UK? Can you name a few industries using R in the UK?

Our R User Group is based at the University of Warwick, so most of our group members are researchers and Ph.D. students at the university. During the pandemic, we were able to increase the reach of our group outside of the university through online events. We are currently trying to alternate between in-person and online meetings. Most of the people attending our meetings outside of the university come through a connection to alumni working in the industry. So our group has a strong link to the university.

The R community in the UK is very vibrant, with several active R User groups. R is widely used in universities and in industry. I recently attended an NHS-R Conference organized by the NHS R community. The use of R in the NHS and other public sector organizations is rapidly growing. 

In industry, R is being used across sectors. It is being used in Pharma and also in journalism. The government here in the UK and the Office of National Statistics are also using R. Many data scientists working for a variety of businesses use R. 

How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members? What techniques (Github, zoom, other) have you used to connect and collaborate with members? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?   

The pandemic coincided with our main group organizer moving away. So our group wasn’t very active for a couple of years. We restarted our group with online meetings at the end of 2021. Initially, we hosted some joint meetings with other R user groups, like the Barcelona R User Group and the Manchester “R-thritis” group at the University of Manchester. Once we got things going and gathered a community again, we started hosting some in-person events. Over this past year, people have been gradually getting back to in-person events. We would love to host in-person events more frequently, but our members also like the flexibility of online events.  

We have been using Microsoft Teams for our online meetings because we also use that at the university. We have a GitHub repository for our group. The organizing team uses GitHub to set up to-do lists for organizing meetings. 

We don’t upload recordings of our meetups on YouTube as speakers are often not very comfortable with that. We have a website and we share slides from the speakers there. For now, we are hosting either in-person or online meetings, but we would love to host hybrid meetings in the future. We had some changes in the organizing team and we are still picking things up. But that’s definitely something we are working on.

Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting? What was the topic and why was it so interesting?

Recently, we had a couple of connected presentations related to reproducibility. It sort of spun out of a discussion that we had in our in-person meeting. One of our members had this issue with reproducibility and asked the group about different tools that are available. We thought that was quite a big topic and we could have a couple of sessions for that. The first session looked at package management tools like automagic or renv and the next session was about containers, specifically docker containers.

Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium, do you have a favorite project? Why is it your favorite?

There are many significant projects that the R Consortium has funded and I’m grateful for the support they give to the R project and the R community. Some of the projects that have been particularly useful to me as a community organizer are the satRdays, Forwards workshops for women and girls, R Community Explorer, and the R-Ladies organizational guidebook. But my current favorite is the R Girls School Network – I was happy to meet the founder, Dr. Razia Ghani, at NHS-R Community Conference 2022 in Birmingham recently and some of us from the Warwick R User Group hope to visit her school in the future. I think it is great to have materials on R that are accessible to children in high school and to have a network that particularly encourages girls to find joy in using R.

Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite?  Why is it your favorite?

My favorite active working group is the R Repositories working group. They are working to make the CRAN check process and policies more transparent to package developers, to avoid some of the frustrations that can come with packages not passing CRAN checks.

When is your next event? Please give details!

Our next event is an online meetup, where Ellen Zapata-Webborn from the UCL Energy Institute will talk about “Using Predictive Modelling to Study the Impact of COVID-19 on Energy Consumption.” 

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

Dr. Gergely Daróczi is an active member of the R community, founder of the Budapest Users of R Network Group and organizer of the satRday and eRum conferences. Gergely shares about his path which led him to become an enthusiastic developer, promoter, and supporter of the R language. He is committed to proving the benefits of the language to the community in Budapest and worldwide. 

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Why did you personally get interested in learning R? How do you use it in your work? What do you do when you’re not programming? 

My interest in R started when I was at university, in an Economics class back in 2004. I really remember that class well because it was about the chaotic dynamics of the potato market in Hungary – a rather abstract and complex theory for a sophomore. We had done a simulation in R, and I was fascinated to see how useful the language was. Since that moment, I have been interested in learning R, and up to now, I am still using it.

Regarding my work, the R language has been a game changer, from the time I was working for market and public opinion research companies, where I had to do survey analysis with R, until I founded my own web-based reporting and R consulting company. Then I moved to Los Angeles to work as a lead R Developer and Research Data Scientist, and R has been the main programming language in my whole professional career. 

When I am not programming, I spend time with my family: I have three kids, and I really enjoy being with them. 

What is the R community like in Budapest? What was most surprising to you about the community? 

Everything started in 2014 in Spain, when I had the pleasure of meeting many people from GitHub and other communities at the annual useR! conference. It was great to meet everyone in person, especially Szilard Pafka, who urged me to start the R User Group in Hungary. I liked the idea, so I started looking for other interested colleagues and we had our first meetup, gathering 10 people. Fortunately, the community has grown and we are now 1,700 members in Budapest, an amazing number considering our small country. On the other hand, the number of active community members is much lower: before COVID, we used to have 50-100 people showing up, but after COVID on average 25 people or even less.

For me, the most surprising thing about the community is to see people with different backgrounds, such as medical sciences, social sciences, natural sciences, and more, who in the end share the same goal: learn and promote the use of the R language. 

Who comes to these meetups? What industries do you see more in Budapest? 

The people who attend these meetups are very diverse, you find people from all backgrounds like professors, students, programmers, and more. All of them are looking to learn R or to meet others using R.

How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members? What techniques (Github, zoom, other) have you used to connect and collaborate with members? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future? 

Unfortunately, we had no events during the pandemic. In fact, the R User Group in Budapest just came back in June this year. The reason why we did not have online events during COVID is because I definitely believe that meetups are much better when done in a face-to-face way, like being able to talk after the talks, having lunch together, having a drink… Activities that are hardly possible in online events.

What trends do you see in R language over the next year? 

The trend that I particularly see over the next years is the increasing integration of programming languages, such as the introduction of C++ in R, or using Java or Python through R for the past years, and integrating packages from other languages (such as Rust) in R rather than writing everything in R. 

What is your favorite R event that you have attended? From a small meetup to a big conference! 

Among the big conferences, I liked the Use R! Conference because I had the opportunity to interact with people from different countries, especially with those I knew through GitHub but had not had the chance to meet in person. It is great to have so many people gathered in one place using the same language. Regarding the smaller conferences, I am obviously biased, as we had both SatRdays and ERUM conferences in Budapest, amazing events as well. 

Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium, do you have a favorite project? Why is it your favorite? 

There are many good projects, so it is difficult to make a decision, but if I had to choose one, my favorite is SatRdays. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to help bring the first event live in Hungary in 2016, and I also attended others in the next few years, which were amazing. 

Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite? Why is it your favorite? 

My favorite is the R Validation Hub. I think it is great having a lot of open-source contributors in this critical group making sure things in the R ecosystem are implemented and distributed correctly. 

When is your next event? What are your plans for the group for the coming year? Please give details! 

Our last event of the year was the annual “Data Christmas” in mid-December. This is something we started doing before COVID: most of the Budapest data groups got together and organized a joint event, e.g. highlighting the new trends in R, Python, Big Data etc, as well as other important conferences and community events. This is also a good opportunity to spend a couple of hours networking with other folks interested in data science. 

But clearly, things have changed a lot with COVID. For the coming years, I am not sure we will be as active as a group as we used to be, and I honestly think that we might become a smaller group, but I am still optimistic and see a scenario where we can connect and create opportunities. I also wanted to mention that the local chapter of R Ladies was very active before COVID, and I really liked their purpose of teaching and not just giving talks … I am not sure if that will continue, but I want to believe it will.

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

Paul Stewart of the Moffitt Cancer Center Bio-Data Club talked to the R Consortium about the group’s experience of shifting events online. Paul shared that despite his initial concerns they had a smooth transition to online events. He also shared some of the techniques he uses to keep the meetings inclusive and understandable for all the participants. 

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Can you tell us about your professional background?

I am an Assistant Member at the Moffitt Cancer Center, in Tampa Florida. I am an equivalent of an Assistant Professor. Moffitt is a non-profit cancer hospital and research institute. I work in the department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, and my research is in bioinformatics. To put it simply, we use big molecular data to profile and understand cancer. We try to figure out what these tumors are doing and what are potential treatments based on the molecular profile of individual patients, also known as “personalized medicine”. My expertise, in particular, is in computational proteomics and metabolomics. People may have heard of the genome or genomics, which is the field that studies all of the genes expressed by an organism. Genes are the blueprints for proteins that are functioning inside all cells in our bodies. Proteomics is the field that studies all proteins expressed by an organism. This means the profiling of big data and analyses that go into profiling proteins. Similarly in metabolomics, you are looking at metabolites, small molecules in say blood and urine that can be biomarkers for the early detection of cancer.

How did you start this group? And how has your experience been so far?

I was introduced to the R Consortium several years ago through the Tampa Bay R Users Group. Our group is called the Moffitt Cancer Center Bio-Data Club and even though there is a Moffitt name in the title, we are open to the public. And we have people coming and joining us virtually from all over, all the time.

We started our group in 2018 and we have around 30-50 people attending our meetups. We also hold an annual hackathon which is very successful. There has been no shortage of speakers who want to give these “Hello World” talks that the audience can understand even if they are not hardcore programmers or statisticians. At Moffitt, we work at the intersection of cancer biology, computer science, statistics, machine learning, and mathematics. It is a challenge to be an expert in all of these topics at the same time, so having this venue has been really helpful. 

I think we have done a good job keeping our group accessible given the wide range of backgrounds that we have. Attendees include lab technicians, data analysts, epidemiologists, medical doctors, bioinformaticians, and statisticians. Our meetings are designed such that everybody can benefit from them even if they don’t have a really great programming background.

What is the R community like in Tampa? Can you name a few industries using R in Tampa?

The R community in Tampa is great and constantly growing. As an academic, I tend to hang in academic circles, and locally a lot of the interactions I have is with colleagues working at other universities like the University of South Florida here in Tampa or at the University of Florida in Gainesville to our North.  

Besides the academic circles, it feels like the pandemic really helped to attract more data scientists, developers, and IT folks to Tampa. People realized that you can work from anywhere and Tampa is a great place to live. The weather is great, the beach is nearby, and Disney World is a short car drive away in Orlando. So now we have people from big tech companies like Microsoft and Google all the way down to smaller companies.

We have a robust R and data science community at the Moffitt Cancer Center thanks to our organizational structure. We were one of the first cancer centers to create a Division of Quantitative Sciences led by a VP-level data scientist (Dr. Dana Rollison), and our Division now includes my department (led by Dr. Brooke Fridley, a brilliant biostatistician and data scientist), the Department of Machine Learning, and the Integrated Mathematical Oncology Department. On the hospital side, they use data science for business intelligence and guiding operational decisions. Many companies in the area are hiring in data science and machine learning, and as a quick plug, Moffitt is no exception. Right now we are looking for postdoctoral fellows for our Integrated Program in Cancer and Data Science (ICADS) program as well as a Vice Chair for my department.

How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

At first, it was a bit of a struggle to get a feel for online meetings. Overall, I think we did a good job transitioning to virtual only. At first, I didn’t really like the idea and felt that online meetings are going to be a poor substitute for in-person meetings, but now I totally see the benefit. 

You are able to connect from anywhere in the world, and it’s very easy for the speakers to share their screens. During in-person meetings, speakers often had to use a foreign computer and mostly shared just screenshots or code snippets. So even though our presentations are tutorial-focused, these presentations were not truly interactive. With the transition to online, it is much easier to move from introductory slides to the actual tool/library/package and share how it works. Now it is trivial to run some commands and show the group the output live.

On the audio-visual side too, I was skeptical that people will have trouble hearing. But we didn’t have any audio-visual issues during the meetings. I also had some apprehensions about participation and felt people will not attend because that sense of community will be missing in online meetings. But the numbers really didn’t take a hit and with the amazing advances in software like Zoom, it has been great. 

In a Zoom with 30-40 people, I understand it can be a bit intimidating to unmute yourself and ask questions. To overcome this, I try to help the audience by being the conversation facilitator and by providing references to things the audience might be familiar with or asking the speaker to explain a bit more. I think these efforts have helped the audience get more involved. Going online only certainly has been a bit of a learning experience but I think overall it’s been good. And for the time being just because the logistics are much easier, we are keeping them online for the newer term.

In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?  

For video conferencing, we have been using Zoom. We also use the messaging feature of Zoom a lot as it’s really easy to message other club members at Moffitt. We have been using GitHub fairly extensively even prior to the pandemic. So during the pandemic, we have mainly relied more on Zoom, maybe some features of Zoom like the option to annotate and draw on the screen. 

We wanted to keep our club as open and accessible as possible from the beginning. So every meeting, the accompanying slides, and the links to the presenter goes on GitHub. So we do have an archive of all the meetings and it is not something new for us.

As a lot of the meetings are hosted at Moffitt if there is an internal speaker we don’t record that session and release it to the public. We do have recordings but they are password protected for privacy reasons. We do provide access to our members if they have a question or are confused. Due to these privacy issues, we are still working on setting up a Youtube channel. 

I think we will definitely keep using these techniques in the future. We have had some amazing speakers from around the globe. Our two most recent speakers were Olivier Teytaud, the developer of the Python-based Nevergrad gradient-free optimization platform, and Zuguang Gu, author of the ComplexHeatmap Bioconductor package. Also because these technologies make it much easier for the members to connect from anywhere and they don’t have to deal with traffic and parking to get to Moffitt during the workday. This has definitely been helpful for people and I think it has helped our numbers.

Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting? 

My favorite presentation most recently was by Zuguang Gu, author of the ComplexHeatmap package. This package is an amazing data visualization tool. It allows you to take some data frame or matrix and, with a couple of lines of code, turn it into a publication-ready heatmap. 

A lot of data I work with is high-dimensional, and there is often related information like clinical features, gene mutations, etc., and this software allows you to add these as annotations to the heatmap very easily. You can even have a plot on top of your plot. It is amazing software, and it’s been a very helpful tool in my work. He’s been developing this for years, and I highly recommend this package for heatmaps.

What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?

I think it will be moving more and more into the tidyverse. I am slightly more old school as I learned R more than 10 years ago, and I still do a lot of work in base R. I am slowly working my way into some of the tidyverse packages. stringr is currently my favorite. I think I and others need to get on board because the tidyverse does make a number of data processing and transformation steps much easier.

Machine learning is also becoming in demand in the field and a lot of that work is done in Python. But I think there are some packages and libraries enabling efficient machine learning to be done within R. I think there will be more development in this area and there will be better ways for R to interact with other programming languages.

Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?

I think the New York Times has some wonderful examples of data journalism and they set a high bar with their data visualizations. We can learn a lot from them on how to take all these numbers and transform them into understandable results so that readers from all backgrounds can understand them. 

Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium,  do you have a favorite project?  Why is it your favorite?

I am a big fan of outreach and education (part of the reason why I organize our club), so my favorite funded project is “Setting up an R-Girls-Schools Network“. 

Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite?  Why is it your favorite?

My favorite active working group is the “R7 Package“. I really like the idea of a modernized successor to S3 and S4.

When is your next event? Please give details!

We meet on the third Thursday of the month at 3 pm New York time. We just had our annual hackathon, and I am up against the holidays, so I am still in the middle of arranging a speaker for next month. If you are interested in sharing a package you authored (or even a package that you like using), then please reach out to me.

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

The R Consortium caught up with Elio Campitelli, organizer of the R en Buenos Aires Group in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to talk about their experience leading a group with almost 1,000 members. Elio discusses their early exposure to programming, the group’s special interest in R and social sciences, and plans on building a compiled list of Latin American R packages in 2023.

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Why did you personally get interested in learning R? How do you use it in your work?

I started to learn R when I was doing my undergrad at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. There I met several, now, friends who would join me in the R Community to study and use the R language. I am now the maintainer for several R packages and give courses.

What is the R community like in Buenos Aires, Argentina?

I think the most surprising thing is that the R community is so large and thriving. I started meeting people who use R and have a passion for it. I think the R community is mostly composed of academic members; in my experience, there are fewer people that come from industry, and there are a lot of people that come from the social sciences. Our most attended event was about the use of data science in social sciences; the room was packed and the meetup went overtime with questions and debates about the uses and biases of algorithms.

What industries do you see more in Buenos Aires?

I come from academia, we have some people who come from industry. I also see people in the community coming from agricultural sectors; they use R to analyze crops and agriculture issues. It is quite surprising to see the work they are doing with R.

How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members? What techniques (Github, zoom, other) have you used to connect and collaborate with members?

We were very affected by Covid. We used to have physical meetings in big rooms with snacks and drinks for people in the community courtesy of Medallia. But with Covid, we had to move online, and it was tough to organize meetings that would not interfere with the personal and professional lives of the people in the community. During these meetings, we do a lot of expositions, in which people show what they do with R, and their experiences using this tool, but also people show their projects and books regarding programming and R. 

What trends do you see in R language over the next year?

One of the things that I see in the R language now is the prospect of being able to run R in the browser with web assembly (https://github.com/georgestagg/webR). Having something like that would be amazing; to create apps like Shiny but entirely in the browser.

Also, being able to teach R with no installation and without depending on cloud infrastructure can be great but expensive considering we need to pay in dollars. 

What is your favorite R event you have attended?

Latin R is an R conference in which people talk about R and the use of R in industry and academia. I also helped to organize many events with people I love and whom I get to meet in person during those events. It’s amazing talking about R and its uses with people in my language.

When is your next event? What are your plans for the group for the coming year? Please give details!

In our most recent event, we had people from the tourism ministry in Argentina who are using R in the government. They showed us what they do and how are they using R in that context. In January we are starting the year with a meetup to present a compiled list of R packages to be maintained or authored by people in Latin America. In the long term, we are looking forward to more people that wish to organize these new meetups. We need fresh blood! Check out our Meetup and Twitter for updates on what is happening with R en Buenos Aires. 

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

By: Simisani Ndaba and Edson Kambeu 

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Saturday morning on the 29th of October 2022, the Botswana R User Group, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Botswana, and R-ladies Gaborone collaborated to conduct an R workshop focusing on the fundamentals of R programming for R enthusiasts. Both organizations are the only R communities in Botswana and have had online events on R related topics from speakers around the world. The Department of Computer Science provided the venue and technical support. Altogether, the seven attendees were from different institutions around Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana. Half of the attendees had a basic knowledge of R programming and the other half had a background in Java and Python programming. The workshop was instructed by Botswana R User Group founder, Edson Kambeu, and R-Ladies Gaborone co-founder, Simisani Ndaba. Edson Kambeu, who is a Finance Lecturer, traveled all the way from Francistown, a city in the north of the country to help instruct the workshop. The instructors used google docs to share educational data science websites, R resources, communities, conferences, and workshops for the attendees. 

The Software Carpentry, R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis, was used in the workshop. The other instructor, Simisani Ndaba, is a certified Carpentry Instructor which enabled the Carpentries lesson to be used. The workshop started with an introductory presentation about R programming in Data Science to raise awareness about how R is used in academics and work in Botswana. Afterward, the R programming fundamentals were covered from RStudio IDE, Data Structures, and R packages, to getting help from CRAN and R package vignettes. The attendees were able to understand R functions and statements and questioned parts of R statements they tried to understand like StringAsFactors and they also tried different outputs from changes in R statements. During explanations of the course material, attendees had questions about the similarities between R and Python, and Java and made online searches for alternate functions which demonstrated their curiosity and interest in R capabilities.

At the end of the workshop, attendees were presented with a digital certificate of attendance of the workshop. The workshop has demonstrated an extreme interest in R programming and more workshops need to take place often. The funding was provided by the R consortium which supports R programming community organizations worldwide.

The attendees expressed how the workshop could have reached more people had the event been advertised more broadly through WhatsApp groups, posters, and the university email, which are the main communications channels for the close R Community in Botswana. The workshop had been advertised using Meetup.com, the online platform for community organizations, Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter. People from the social media pages requested an online session which is under consideration and may even attract more participants from around the world. Stay up to date with the latest R activities in Botswana by following R-ladies Gaborone and Botswana R User Group! 🥳

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!

The R Consortium caught up with Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck of the BernR User Group to talk about the challenges of organizing an R User Group during the pandemic. The group has focused many of its meetings on introductory level R topics. Michael discussed the challenges of maintaining the frequency of the meetings as they shifted events online. He also shared his hope of bouncing back with in-person meetups next year.

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How did you get introduced to R?

I am a Psychologist by training and have been working mainly in academia but also in industry. For the past 15 years, I have been using R for research and training. I teach R courses at the university and through the Advanced Studies Program at the University of Basel together with Dirk Wulff – a course series called The R Bootcamp. We started the BernR User Group several years ago, and it grew really quickly. Once we hit the number of members required for a professional meetup account, I learned about the support we could get from the R Consortium and applied. So we set up a professional Meetup account with the R Consortium’s support. Thanks for that!

What is the R community like in Switzerland? 

R is being used extensively in the Pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland, but most of these groups are based in Basel. Here in Bern, the use of R is mostly in academia and administration. In universities, many departments use R, but we also had people from finance and medicine, so there are additional interesting use cases outside of academia.

How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

Before COVID, we were a small group, with events hosted regularly. We met once a month and around 10-15 people attended these in-person meetings. Everybody involved liked it because it was a pleasant group to participate in with a really welcoming atmosphere. In our group, we prefer to talk about basic stuff as most of our members are beginners. It didn’t make sense to talk about super advanced stuff when there is a need for basics. So our talks were on topics like introduction to R or introduction to graphics using ggplot, wrangling data with dplyr, and using RMarkdown. 

During COVID, we stopped the in-person meetings and sat out the first year. Then we started hosting online meetings, but the frequency declined a lot. So there was a big hit that was brought in by COVID in terms of how often we meet. We went down from eight times a year to maybe twice. 

In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?  

For our online meetings, we are using Zoom. There are no online discussion forums that we use. We post the slides and code produced during our meetings to GitHub. We do not record or upload our session because we feel it hinders discussions. If a session is being recorded, people are less likely to speak up, especially newcomers. So I feel that not recording our sessions gives a bit more room for people to talk. 

From my teaching experience, I know that hybrid events can be tricky and I don’t see a lot of benefit in hosting hybrid events when it comes to small groups. In the future, I might consider recording specialized talks for members to go back to. 

Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting? 

One of our organizers, Simon Schwab, did a really amazing talk titled “Introduction to R with the Standford heart transplant data”. He works in the medical area of transplantation medicine or transplantation research, so it’s really down his avenue. He’s an expert on these data sets and gave a detailed introduction to them at a very nice pace. It was a two-part talk series in which he covered loading data sets, displaying them, some summary stats, and then a bit more advanced regression.

What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?

For my group and maybe our department, I think it is clearly reproducible science. Reproducible code is something that has a strong future. I have started using Quarto and trying to introduce it to my group for presentations and projects. This is where things should go at the end – fully reproducible science. 

When is your next event? What are your plans for the group for the coming year? Please give details!

We are struggling at the moment to book a space for physical events. We are bound to host online events, and we agreed that there have been too many online meetings. So we really want to go back to in-person events. We are hopeful that we will get a room from the university next year to host our in-person events and start out again in January or February. I want to give a shoutout to Simon Schwab and Fabio Molo – they are the two in the ‘we’ I am talking about throughout the interview.

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How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute. We are now accepting applications!