Oct 05

R in Pharma works to allow an open inclusive environment

By R Consortium Blog, Events

R Consortium talks to Harvey Lieberman on their growth both pre and post COVID. They have adapted in a way that promotes R in Pharma as well as allowing them to be more inclusive.

R/Pharma is being held Nov 2-4, 2021. Register today! More information available here: rinpharma.com

RC: What is the R community like in R Pharma?

We have an amazing community! We have been able to pull together a group of like-minded people who wish to contribute to R/Pharma. Each year we hold a conference that is entirely community driven from the organizing and program committees to those who work on presentations and workshops.

As a community-led effort anyone who wants to help can do so. Last year we tried to identify people who work on R in smaller biotechs so that we do not become too polarized towards bigger pharma companies.

We also have an active slack group that helps build community.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

A little history of R/Pharma so you can see how it evolved with COVID. We formed a few years ago with the main focus being holding a conference. It was clear that a lot of people were working with R in Pharmaceutical companies from early research through to production, but there wasn’t a conference focussed on this. There were many statistics-based conferences, several geared towards SAS, but nothing industry-based for R practitioners. The first two conferences we held were face-to-face at Harvard University in 2018 and 2019 with 150 attendees. It was clear that more people wanted to attend but we were limited in space. Late 2019 we started to think about how to expand, to accommodate more attendees, and then COVID hit. We quickly pivoted to a virtual event and ended up reaching far more people – with over 1000 registrations for 2020 and we are expecting more for 2021.

Our conference historically attracted attendees from USA and Europe. The benefit of going virtual is that we can bring together people from all over the World. The challenge in managing this post-COVID. R/Pharma has always strived to be a free conference without sponsors and we will be relying on our community to help put future events on in this spirit.

For 2022 we are hoping to host a hybrid event.

RC: 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 have an active slack group which has been growing steadily since 2018. For the conference we use a GitHub repo to archive presentations and workshops, linked to our website. We also have a YouTube channel containing recorded talks and workshops from 2020. We can look at COVID as a double-edged sword with respect to connection – we were able to reach many more people last year but we lost the interpersonal interactions. It’s important to us to be inclusive and virtual experiences break down many barriers.

With regards to the conference in 2020, we held workshops via Zoom and the main conference through the hopin platform. One way in which we promoted additional interaction was through virtual conference booths so that open source authors could showcase their packages and shiny apps. We aim to host the 2021 workshops and conference the same way.

In addition, we communicate to the community via twitter and the R/Pharma website blog.

RC: 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?

We have been blessed with so many great speakers over the past three years. In our first year Joe Cheng gave a talk on Using Interactivity Responsibly in Pharma. Joe is an amazing presenter who can take a topic that is complex and explain it in a way that everyone can understand. The R/Pharma community is amazing and we always have incredible workshops in addition to talks. One that comes to mind is Leon Eyrich Jessen’s workshop on Artificial Neural Networks in R with Keras and TensorFlow. It’s a highly complex topic which Leon teaches in a 3- or 4-hour workshop, from which you leave thinking “how can I now apply this to my own problems?”

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

I think the big one in Pharma, in general, is R for Submissions. This is a space that traditionally has been very heavily SAS-oriented. There is certainly a move in the industry to start to use R. It’s slow because it requires a large amount of retraining, changing infrastructure and dealing with regulations. Leaving college now, you are more likely to be an R expect than a SAS expert.

Another area of growth within the industry are shiny apps. This has democratized the ability to communicate complex statistical outputs. Couple that with shiny modules and you have the ability to build complex interactive graphical apps rapidly.

RC: 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?

Externally I do not but everyone in the industry uses these as a way to communicate internally on a daily basis. I’m working in a group that has started using data stories as a way to communicate complex information in a digestable way. As a Brit I tend to read the BBC a lot and like how they are embracing data journalism. FiveThiryEight too is a great site.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

R/Pharma 2021 will be held from November 2-4. Workshops will be running the week before. The event is free and you can find registration details on our website at rinpharma.com.

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

R Ladies is my favorite, mainly because it was something very conscious. We did have an imbalance in our industry Ladies is a favorite. Our industry is trying to address a gender imbalance and R/Pharma, as an organization, is very conscious of that.

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

The R Validation Hub is heavily connected to R/Pharma. Having a way to validate packages is very important to our industry. Members of the R Validation Hub regularly present or host workshops at R/Pharma.

RC: There are four projects that are R Consortium Top Level Projects. If you could add another project to this list for guaranteed funding for 3 years and a voting seat on the ISC, which project would you add?

R for submissions. The R Consortium is spearheading an effort that is complex but important to our industry. Having a way to bring multiple companies together to work with regulatory bodies is essential.

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 4 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!

Oct 04

Love0

R Hispano talks about the growth of local groups

By R Consortium Blog

During the pandemic, we have seen a lot of growth within the R community. Recently, R Consortium talked to Emilio López Cano, president of R Hispano, about the growth of the R Communities in Spain.

RC: What is the R community like in Spain?

ELC: We are a national organization called R Hispano that hosts activities. We have a yearly conference called Jornadas which is like a workshop. The last conference in 2019 was a proper conference and we had a lot of companies committed to the conference. We had a lot of local user R groups there as well. We had a large number of national members in the organization from the local groups: Madrid, Canarias, Murcia, Málaga, Sevilla, Córdoba, Galicia, or Castilla-La Mancha. You can find an interview with R Hispano, president of an agency in the Ministry of Economy here.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

ELC: Our annual conference is held in November. In 2019 we did it in Madrid, with the collaboration of the multinational company Repsol, and we invited famous speakers like Max Kuhn, Bernd Bischl, and Jo-Fai Chow (videos available here and slides and other material available here). We planned the 2020 meeting in Córdoba, but we had to postpone it due to COVID. This year it will not be possible to hold it, so we will do it next year. To keep the community alive, last year we organized, jointly with U-TAD, a two-day online event that was quite successful (encuentRo en la fase R, encounteR in the R phase). We used the online platform of U-TAD and Blackboard collaborate. Javier Luraschi was our invited speaker, and the Ecuador R User Group organized the session. Also, the annual assembly of the association was held online, thanks to the University of Murcia Zoom platform. Definitely yes, these techniques help spread our activities and engage more people. Whenever it was possible, past annual conferences were also accessible in streaming.

The local groups have also adapted to this situation. The Canary Islands group organized a YouTube streaming event last April. The Madrid group resumed its meetings on May 26 and they share materials and videos online. The Murcia group has organized several events during the Pandemic, the last one was online, workshop videos and materials are available here). Next month, the most recent group in Castilla-La Mancha, R Quixote is hosting a workshop on R for Business, Teaching, and Research, both in-person (30 spots, filled in 24 hours) and online (unlimited)

ELC: We used Blackboard collaborate to run a conference. It was what we had and it worked fine. I prefer Microsoft Teams which we use in university. Sadly, a lot of people in the R community don’t tend to have access to them.

RC: 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?

ELC: The presentation by Borja Andrino during the Canarias meetup in April was very interesting to me. He is a data analyst in the prestigious “El País” newspaper. Within the team of Kiko Llaneras, they analyze election data, and all types of data using R and other tools, and we could see how R is used in something we see every day in the news.

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

ELC: The new pipe in 4.1 and will it substitute or replace tidyverse. In our group, we have a lot of fans of data.table package and a lot of people use base R and a lot of people use tidyverse. Also, artificial intelligence with the new algorithms and how they are integrated into R. This is a trend that we will have to keep an eye on.

ELC: This is a topic that we include in many activities. At the 2019 conference, we held a round table with top actors in the Spanish scene. Not to mention the presentation by Borja remarked before.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

ELC: As far as the local groups are concerned, the one by R Quixote is the next meeting. The next annual conference will be held in Córdoba. We probably will have more details after the summer, when vaccination in Spain advances and we can make plans for 2022. Maybe an online event (a new “encuentRo”) will also be planned before 2021 ends.

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

ELC: Everything related to spatial data and analytics is worth mentioning, as “maps” is something very important for outreach, so I would say my favorite now is Spatiotemporal Data and Analytics.

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

ELC: Even though I have been using R in Pharma and in Business (so those groups are amongst my favorites), I would say my very favorite is the Code Coverage one. I plan to improve my SixSigma package and my developments for companies adding quality software good practices in there.

ELC: If I had to choose among the current projects, I would say “Database interoperability for spatial objects in R”, to facilitate “in production” applications of spatial analysis and visualization. If I could suggest a new project, I would support something related to R communities in production (business and/or public bodies). Similar to other community projects, people with common interests in R and their business could spread the word in sectors with high potentials, such as the food industry, manufacturing, etc. I did submit a proposal some time ago on this as well.

How do I Join?

Oct 01

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September 2021 ISC Call for Proposals – Now Open!

By R Consortium Announcement, Blog

The deadline for submitting proposals is October 31, 2021.

The September 2021 ISC Call for Proposals is now open. The R Consortium’s Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) solicits progressive, pioneering projects that will benefit and serve the R community and ecosystem at large. The ISC’s goal is to foster innovation and help bring your ideas into tangible realities.

Please consider applying!

Although there is no set theme for this round of proposals, grant proposals should be focused in scope. If you are currently working on a larger project, consider breaking it into smaller, more manageable subprojects for a given proposal. The ISC encourages you to “Think Big” but create reasonable milestones. The ISC favors grant proposals with meaningful detailed milestones and justifiable grant requests, so please include measurable objectives attached to project milestones, a team roster, and a detailed projection of how grant money would be allocated. Teams with detailed plans and that can point to previous successful projects are most likely to be selected.

To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form.

Sep 23

Love0

EARL ONLINE 2021: HIGHLIGHTS

By R Consortium Blog, Events

Originally posted on Mango Solutions website

The Enterprise Applications of the R Language Conference (EARL) is a cross-sector conference focusing on the commercial use of the R programming language. The conference is dedicated to the real-world usage of R with some of the world’s leading practitioners. This year, it was held September 6-10, 2021.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for EARL 2021 – especially to all of the fantastic presenters! We were pleased to receive lots of really positive feedback from the online event and there are plenty of highlights to share.

Branka Subotic, NATS

It was great to kick off EARL 2021 with our first keynote of the day from Branka. She has worked for NATS since 2018 and is currently their Director of Analytics. Branka shared with us interesting ways to help teams to work together and also some unusual ways to upskill! Her talk was peppered with some videos showing us flight data and the impacts of Covid.

Chris Beeley, NHS – Stronger together, making healthcare open- building the NHS-R Community

We are always delighted to hear from the NHS at the EARL Conference and this year was no exception. We were treated to a passionate talk from Chris on how the NHS-R community has been built up over the years and how their conference has gone from strength to strength. We all know how supportive the R community can be, so it is great to see this in action.

Amit Kohli – Introduction to network analysis

Amit gave us an introduction to the principles of network analysis and shared several use-cases demonstrating their unique powers. Amit also included a fun way to interact with his talk with the use of a QR code – we can always rely on Amit to entertain us! Our team thought it was a really interesting topic and it felt accessible to those who perhaps don’t know much on the subject.

Emily Riederer, Capital One – How to make R packages part of your team

We loved Emily’s fun concept of making R packages a real part of your team and her use of code, and the choices she made along the way. Her talk examined how internal R packages can drive the most value for their organisation when they embrace an organisation’s context, as opposed to open source packages which thrive with increasing abstraction. Read our interview with Emily here.

Dr. Jacqueline Nolis, Saturn Cloud

We closed the day with our final keynote talk from Jacqueline Nolis. She is a data science leader with over 15 years of experience in managing data science teams and projects, at companies ranging from DSW to Airbnb. She currently is the Head of Data Science at Saturn Cloud where she helps design products for data scientists. Jacqueline spoke to us about taking risks in your career and shared with us the various risks she has taken over her career and how they went! It was inspiring to hear from an experienced data scientist that it’s ok to take a risk every now and then – and refreshing to hear her honesty about what could have gone better – and how she has ultimately learned and grown from this.

These are just a few of the brilliant talks from a fantastic conference day. It was a delight to have speakers and attendees joining us from across the world – so thank you again to all that came along.

We are hoping to be back in London next year to host EARL in-person again. We are tentatively holding the 6th-8th of September 2022 as our conference dates. If you’d like to keep up-to-date on all things EARL please join our mailing list. We will open the call for abstracts in January 2022.

Sep 16

Love0

Creating Successful R User Groups in Abuja, Nigeria

By R Consortium Blog, Events

Bilikisu Aderinto, Founder/Organizer of the Abuja R User Group and R-Ladies Abuja, talks about the lack of R User groups in her area, and her desire to start one, leading to a large increase in members in Abuja. She talks about the issues with income disparity and how it affected lockdown attendance for the group. She also talks about training others to increase their knowledge base in the area.

RC: What is the R community like in Abuja?

BA: I got involved with the R community online while learning and growing professionally as an R user. With a lot that I have learned from various communities with a presence online, I decided to look for a local community close to me. I found none and it was getting lonely as most professional groups in my community were not interested in using R as a programming language.

So, I decided to start the Abuja R user Group for my local community in October 2019. The response was great as so many members were having similar stories to mine. Most members were new to R, while others were either looking for opportunities that R would bring to their career. In the beginning, we had challenges getting to meeting places and reaching out to members but this was overcome by the positive interest shown by members as we created various committees to manage our activities. We also got support from other local communities in Nigeria.

I also went ahead to create the R-Ladies group to encourage and give more focus to the few members in March 2020 despite the lockdown.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

BA: The impact of the lockdown was highly negative as it was not planned for and there was no end in sight. Virtual meetings were alien to our members and most members had difficulties getting online due to the low standard of living.

BA: We shifted our monthly meetups to virtual meetings on Zoom every other month to accommodate all members. We also shared resources and attended to questions or concerns via a Whatsapp group. We also extended our invitations to the global community which boosted the participation and morale of local members.

RC: 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?

BA: Abuja R User group had the pleasure of having Dr. K.O. Obisesan from the prestigious University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He took us through Statistical Modeling in R. This got so much audience from Nigeria and globally as well.

For R-Ladies, we had the honor of having our own Julia Silge take us through steps we can take to learn and understand text mining in R. She was wonderful taking her time despite her busy schedule to attend our webinar. The audience was well spread globally.

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

BA: I think there is a lot to do in getting R known in our academic institutions within our local community. We have started a work plan this month on taking every member through a path from zero knowledge of R to a user of R. We are working with some organizations to support us in achieving this goal.

The impact of RMarkdown and Shiny is another focus as we explore their adoption and implementation by members within the corporate and public health organization.

BA: I would like to appreciate the work done by people in storybench.org. Their project on data journalism in R is applaudable as it relates to our community.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

BA: Our next event is coming up on October 2nd, and it’s going to be an introduction to Tidymodels framework for machine learning as part of our work plan in taking the new members to a higher level as an R users.

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

BA: The R-Ladies global project has had a great impact on me. I have benefited along with some members in the RStudio Instructor training and certification as well as their support for R-Ladies Abuja.

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

BA: The R Certification project is the one that attracts my interest most. I look forward to seeing future changes that would bring more value to the process and the certificate as well.

BA: I would like a project to support the inclusion of the teaching of R in our institutions and support academics and students.

How do I Join?

Sep 15

Love0

LA R Expands Beyond California

By R Consortium Blog, Events

R Consortium talks to LA R Users founder Szilard Pafka about how the community started, how they adapted to the pandemic and how things have evolved in the past fifteen years for the group.

RC: What is the R community like in Los Angeles?

SP: The Los Angeles R Users Group/LA R meetup was founded in March 2009 by me, Szilard Pafka, and Professor Jan de Leeuw, the then Chair of the UCLA Statistics Department. It was not only the first R meetup in the area, but the very first data/data science meetup in LA (actually the term data science became more widely used only later). Right from this early beginning, we covered not only R, but also more broadly statistics, data visualization, machine learning, and more, all through the R language. The meetup quickly attracted a lot of people and it was one of the 3 earliest, largest, and most active R communities in the US along with San Francisco Bay Area and New York.

While the first few years the events were mostly hosted at UCLA, we moved slowly to Santa Monica startup locations (including Google) and the focus became even more on tools/techniques that can be used in day-to-day data science practice. We often had speakers from out of town including some of the fame in the R community. In 2014 we became part of DataScience.LA, a community of meetups with a website that made sharing of information and knowledge even more easily.

In 2018 a group of young organizers (Malcolm Barrett, Emil Hvitfeldt, George G Vega Yon, Keren Xu) started a separate sub-group (LA R East) with events at USC, and then in 2019, Amy Tzu-Yu Chen started LA R West. During the pandemic the events became online and while networking became more difficult, the positive side effect was that now it was easier to “bring” more renowned people as speakers.

The other side effect was that now anyone from all over the world could join the meetup and enjoy the show. In July 2021 I (Szilard) moved to Texas and the original meetup group we used for events has moved too and will do mostly online/USA rather than Los Angeles focused events, while the other organizers will continue the LA events (online for now and then in-person later under the new brand of Southern California R by joining efforts with other SoCal R groups).

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

SP: While moving online has had some positive side effects on the talks part, the networking part of the meetup (which is the other equally important component) has suffered. While organizers could still connect with the members, and the Q&As at the end of the talks have worked pretty well (that is members asking questions and the speakers answering), the lively/casual discussions between members after the meetup were completely missing. Over the many years previous to COVID I have heard countless stories from members about how they managed to get a job by starting chatting with employers at our events, and also the other way around (I have many friends who managed to hire great people via the meetups). Unfortunately, all this has been missing, and also the general hanging out and face-to-face meets that build up slowly but surely a community.

RC: 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?

SP: I liked James Lamb’s presentation on Writing command-line interfaces to R. The topic was interesting and very technical, but there was something to learn for people at all levels and James is a fantastic speaker.

He also gave another awesome talk at the “sister” meetup (DataScience.LA) about LightGBM (one of the most popular gradients boosting machines implementations), which was particularly interesting since James has been leading the R side of that important machine learning project (and he can be accredited with getting the library finally accepted to CRAN).

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

SP: I’ve been using R at the company I’m working at since 2006. While 15 years ago some of the R tools were more “rough,” even then we managed to do most of what we needed for analytics in R. We had for example machine learning models trained and running in production in R and even sophisticated graphical monitoring dashboards built with cronjobs, R, the lattice R library and HTML templates. R was already a viable and great tool for all data work 15 years ago.

Since then things in R have become even easier, more robust, and with more features. For example, shiny has made creating interactive graphical tools and dashboards a breeze. Or on the machine learning front R integrates now all the top high-performance machine learning libraries used in practice/business applications (e.g. gradient boosting machine libraries such as xgboost, lightgbm, h2o, or catboost, both on CPU and GPU, and also neural network libraries such as tensorflow or pytorch, etc). And tremendous work has been done to improve R in performance, reliability, and integration with other tools – making R even easier to use in production.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

SP: The part of the meetup that has moved to Texas/online/pan-USA will have its first next event in September and it will involve using R in production (stay tuned!) and I’m sure the organizers of the remaining SoCal R groups are also busy planning their next event.

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

SP: First of all, I have to say that it is great we have the R Consortium and the funding and we can sponsor so many projects. As for my preference, I’m really happy to see projects that improve R’s performance, speed, memory usage, reliability, integration with other tools – in a word R’s ability to compete for being the best tool for data science and for being used in production.

So my favorites from this year’s batch are “Development and maintenance of the Windows build infrastructure” and “MATTER 2.0: larger-than-memory data for R.” We need to compete with Python and be able to dispel views that R is not suitable for serious projects or in production.

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

SP: For the same reason as the above, my favorites are “Code Coverage,” “Distributed Computing” and “R / Business.”

SP: Tools for R in production. We need to make sure that we are seen as a viable competitor with Python for production. So, we need to have more tools to do so.

How do I Join?

Sep 14

Love0

Register now! PSI Scientific Meeting: Generating Insights through Modern Applications of Data Visualisation

By R Consortium Blog, Events

Upcoming event: PSI Scientific Meeting: Generating Insights through Modern Applications of Data Visualisation

While data visualisation has been used to gain insights into medical data for over 150 years, modern methods including interactive and animated visualisations, and the development of open source programming tools are expanding what is possible.

This online event will provide a practical introduction to modern methods of data visualisation, including presentations from some well-known and influential speakers in part 1 and practical hands-on workshop exercises in part 2.

It will be held on two successive Fridays: September 17, 2021 and September 24, 2021.

Register here.

Aug 30

Love0

A Latin American R community for HR

By R Consortium Blog

By Sergio Garcia Mora

R4HR, formerly known as the Club de R para RRHH, is a Latin American based community whose mission is to spread the adoption of R in Human Relations (HR), trying to make it as simple and engaging as possible, and most importantly, in Spanish, our own language.

R4HR is holding their first R Consortium meetup on September 4th!

This post is contributed by Sergio Garcia Mora. Sergio is an “HR NeRd” with a bachelor in Labour Relations UBA with a postgraduate course on Data Science applied to Social Sciences UNSAM. Sergio is the founder of R4HR and Data 4HR, and works as a SME of People Analytics at Data IQ. He is a People Analytics teacher at ITBA and is soon to become a Data Carpentry Certified Instructor.

From Sergio: “A fact about me: Data shows that I have a lot in common with Keanu Reeves.”

My relationship with R hasn’t been linear. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why I chose to study Labor Relations is that it’s a numbers-free career as a career that has not many subjects related to maths, algebra and those kind of subjects (I like to joke that Labor Relations is like Human Resources but more hippie). Life is funny because nowadays I’m known in the People Analytics field in Argentina.

My first contact with R was in 2016 when I joined the Data Mining Master Course of the University of Buenos Aires, where R was the go-to language for most of my peers. As someone that didn’t have a background in coding or in computer science I struggled a lot trying to keep pace with my peers. Then I started to develop an entrepreneurial project and decided to delegate all the coding and technical job to my partner and I will focus more on the functional aspects of the job. So for a couple of years I didn’t write any line of code at all.

Late in 2019 I joined a BI company in Buenos Aires, called Data IQ, with such a stimulating environment, with great people, excellent professionals and a challenging environment. So, after a couple of months I started to think what can I give that was different and fresh for my team, apart from my knowledge in HR and People Analytics. So like the natural career path for BI developers is to grow towards Data Science, I thought it would be a good idea to try to learn R and bring that knowledge to the table. And it ended up not only being a good idea, but a great one.

I chose to learn R first because the code syntax is more straightforward to understand for me. And also the R community is simply awesome, specially the Latin American chapters from Argentina to Mexico, they all are very supportive and inclusive, and they all create safe and welcoming environments.

So there I was again, my R script and me face to face. Even though I can speak English and I’m comfortable with reading in this language, not everyone in Latin America is this lucky. And the other barrier I had to struggle with was the technical jargon. There a a lot of free resources but most of them are aimed at highly technical people, or to an academic audience. And the third problem I had was finding HR data. So my problems were dealing with a language that wasn’t my own, with a jargon that I don’t understand, and with data that doesn’t make sense to me.

So in May 2020 the Club de R para RRHH was born. I always remember Richard Feyman’s quote “The best way to learn something is to teach it” so that was one of my drivers.

R4HR is a project that was born in the pandemics, and thanks to it, I still can’t believe the reach we have. In our community you can find people from Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Panama, USA, Spain and even France and with so many different backgrounds, HR, Psychology, Economics, Statistics, and many more.

During most of 2020 we ran our sessions on a weekly basis. And we used to charge a fee to be part of it.First because I used to think that people wouldn’’t value free stuff, and secondly, once a month we used to invite a R expert to teach us something, so we payed them for their time.

We were fortunate enough to have people like Pablo Tiscornia, Pablo Casas, Ana Laura Diedrichs, Hernán Escudero, Angie Scetta, and Paola Corrales sharing content about survey analysis, exploratory data analysis, git, Shiny, geospatial analysis, and publishing your analysis from RMarkdown to blogdown. So, our Google Drive is being filled with such priceless content.

And the community started to develop in such an organic and genuine way that still amazes me, so then it was when we decided to open all our content, and embrace the same values of the R community: openness, solidarity, safety, and high end content in an inclusive environment. And late in 2020 all of our content and our meetups are free.

So, we have content in our own language, with a jargon adapted to our backgrounds and practices, but we still lack data. So, inspired on an open salary survey developed a tech-community, SysArmy, we launched in October our first HR Salary KIWI Survey for Latam (KIWI stands for Key Investigation of Wages and Incomes after joking about ridiculous perks sometimes we see in job postings), and we have run the analysis on our own that everyone can see online and the data is available who anyone that wants to use it.

Nowadays we try to gather on a monthly basis, more people have embarked in the organizing team, and it’s so great to see the impact it has in some people, from welcome anyone and become part of the group, people finding new and better jobs, and making friends in places where nobody would have ever expected.

It’s been one of the most amazing journeys I’ve been to. And now being part of the R Consortium is such a satisfying milestone for our young community.

Jul 28

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London RUG on Creating an Open and Inviting Group

By R Consortium Blog, Events

R Consortium talks to Laura Swales of the London R User Group on how they are dealing with COVID and changing some of the basics of their meeting. As they enter the end of the lockdown, they hope to maintain the ties online while allowing the casual networking that made the meetups inviting in the first place.

RC: What is the R community like in London?

LS: I have been involved with the R community for 4 years. The company I work for, Mango, runs events so my background is more in marketing and events. That being said, it is so refreshing to have a community that cares, is engaging, and enthusiastic about its field. This is odd in most industries. It is a welcoming field – they don’t make me feel weird for not knowing R or data science. If I want to know something, I don’t feel out of place to ask and they answer my questions, which is nice! There is no gatekeeping and people don’t come in with an elitist attitude. Usually, people would come in person, have a drink, and find out what others are doing. It’s a great environment to be in. It is nice that my job itself is to help build the community. I think I am one of the few people who do this as part of their job, Rachel Dempsey at R Studio also has a similar role, and it has been great to talk to her about managing communities.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

LS: The biggest thing that has been affected is the missed opportunities to chat in a relaxed environment. This was one of our big draws, and it’s the hardest thing to replicate online. It is really hard to do casual networking in an online setting. We can do content talks and workshops, but it’s been a real challenge to do networking. I’ve seen people use different ways, but it’s really difficult to do.

LS: We started with Zoom with the account from work since people were used to that. We ended up moving to BigMarker to improve the process for attendees. We found that zoom had issues, with an extra step to add to people’s calendars. With BigMarker, people were able to automatically add the event to their calendar. It also has a lot of built-in features that allow for better communication. We have used hopin before, but BigMarker seems to be working better.

RC: 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?

LS: Robert Hickman did a talk on Amateur and Professional Analytics of Football (soccer) using R. I’m not a data scientist, so this talk was more tangible because it’s something that I can comprehend!Football is something I know even if I’m not a big fan. The attendees had a lot of good questions – for example ‘How did he get the data, is it comparable to other sports’, and more.

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

LS: I spoke to the members about this and they said that the surge in the tidy model ecosystem is going to be a big one. I also heard about the increased focus on auto-testing. Finally, the process framework for writing better code for the community will be big.

LS: The people from the NHS R Community are doing great work. They are doing some interesting things and we are going to be involved in their conference in November. Their work is in the real world since they are working with Health Analytics. They have a lot of content on the stats of COVID, and their project and works are impacting the UK.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

LS: We tend to have fewer events online due to conflicts with people’s schedules. How we tend to run them is one month we would run a workshop and then the next month a presentation. Normally, in a world without COVID, we would run late into the evening. However, since people are at home and have scheduling conflicts at home, our events are running shorter. Because of that, we have tried to set them up earlier in the evening. We currently don’t have anything scheduled right now. However, something that I’ve noticed is that with online events we don’t need to have a lot of lead time. I asked members if they would be interested in an in-person meetup and have gotten a positive response. I hope to have an online event maybe in July and hopefully an in-person in September or October. For the in-person, we may be able to have a live stream on twitch depending on the internet at the venue.

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

LS: Consolidating R Ladies global. A lot of my colleagues have come from R Ladies and it’s been great to see it grow and become an important part of the community and be so welcoming. They are not afraid to stand up for what they believe in. They also make R an accessible place to be. They don’t judge your background, as long as you are there.

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

LS: R pharma is my favorite. It has been interesting to see how the pharma industry is working. Despite the setup of the companies (with NDA agreements), they are open to sharing how they are doing, being collaborative even within their work. It is refreshing to see.

LS: Accessibility within R would be a great thing to look at. It is always important to allow equal access to people, and can only be a good thing that expands access to other groups.

How do I Join?

Jul 26

Love0

R Consortium and You – How to get involved

By R Consortium Blog, Events

By Mehar Pratap Singh, CEO and Founder – ProCogia

R consortium fulfills a unique need in the growing data science space. Also, R language resources are critical tools in the data-driven economy. The R ecosystem productizes openly developed technology into commercial products and solutions. Businesses sustain the virtual cycle by reinvesting profits into the project and technical community.

R consortium sits under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. R consortium is here to support the R community to promote, develop and extend the reach of R. The R Consortium’s open-source governance and foundation model has been uniquely positioned to benefit the worldwide community of users, maintainers, and software developers. You will be able to find out about the who, the what and the why around R-consortium

You will also learn about:

How R Consortium connects the dots within the R community & promotes collaboration
R Consortium mission and vision
R Consortium Membership
The impact of R Consortium
Projects with sustainable ecosystems matter
R Consortium Funded Activities and Projects
Working Groups drive industry engagement
How can you get involved?

Bottom line is, R Consortium welcomes members from all types of organizations!

From the useR! 2021 conference

Also, I wanted to share my experience at the recent useR! 2021 conference. The keynote presentations from July 5- 9 conference were very interesting. Below are some my key takeaways:

1. R Spatial analysis

R Spatial is a lively community of people using R for analyzing spatial data. Things took off from 2005 on when packages like sp, rgdal, rgeos and raster provided shareable infrastructure for spatial vector and raster data. R Spatial has constantly relied on the OSGEO libraries GDAL, PROJ and GEOS for I/O, coordinate transformations, and geometrical operations. Upcoming changes for R Spatial include switching to spherical geometry, handling of data cubes, and time-dependent coordinate reference systems that cope with plate tectonics.

Speaker: Professor Edzer Pebesma at the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Münster.

2. Tools and technologies for supporting algorithm fairness and inclusion

Graphic representations created by R are easily understood by people with no background in statistics, which makes it a great tool for advancing public policy and the Sustainable Development Goals.

“Inyathi ibuzwa kwabaphambili” is a Xhosa proverb, which means wisdom is learned or sought from the elders, or those ahead in the journey. In this multi-contribution keynote, we will hear from those ahead in the journey – Dorothy Gordon, Achim Zeileis, Kristian Lum and Jonathan Godfrey.

Dorothy Gordon, chair of the UNESCO Information For All Program, talked about making technology accessible particularly to women and Africans, and how utilizing tools such as R can help advance public policy. Achim Zeileis, Professor of Statistics, University of Innsbruck, Austria, will discuss making the color schemes in data visualizations accessible for as many users as possible.

Speakers: Achim Zeileis; Dorothy Gordon; Kristian Lum; Jonat Godfrey

3. Can we do this in R? – Answering questions about air quality one code at a time

Every time we encounter a large dataset, a new modelling approach, a new statistical technique, a new visualization challenge, we ask ourselves: “Can we do this in R?” and for the past four years (since we started this work), the answer has been a resounding “yes.”

Speaker: Meenakshi Kushwaha, Co-Founder and Director of Research, ILK Labs, Bangalore

4. Teaching how to teach without leaving anyone behind

Metadocencia was born in March 2020 when the pandemic forced us to change the way we teach and learn. We began by running a workshop with evidence-based educational methods that could be applied in a simple way. We also provided open resources to encourage effective teaching practices and invited people to share their experiences and form a community. A year later, we opened 3 new workshops and reached more than 1500 people in 30 countries.

Speakers: Paola Corrales; Elio Campitelli; Ivan Poggio

5. Expanding the Vocabulary of R Graphics

R Graphics system defines a graphics vocabulary for R – a set of possible graphics operations like drawing a line, coloring in a polygon or setting a clipping region. This talk will describe work on the graphics engine that expands its vocabulary to include gradient fills, pattern fills, clipping paths, and masks.

Speaker: Paul Murrell, Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland

6. Research software engineers and academia

Nearly all research relies on research software, yet we are still lacking adequate acknowledgment and career paths for RSEs. I want to discuss the status quo and future of software in research, the role of the R community, and what it has to do with my personal path.

Speaker: Heidi Seibold, Group lead of the Open AI in Health group at Helmholtz AI

7. The R-universe project

R-universe is a new platform by rOpenSci under which we experiment with various ideas for improving publication and discovery of research software in R. The system automatically tracks upstream git package repositories, builds binary packages for Windows and Mac, renders vignettes, and makes data available.

Speaker: Jeroen Ooms, Staff research engineer at UC Berkeley

8. Communication – elevating data analysis to make a real impact

Data analysis is key to identify patterns, understand processes and guide effective policy-making to solve real world problems. Data journalist Catherine Gicheru and atmospheric scientist Katherine Hayhoe will share their work and experience communicating key data results to the general public and stakeholders.

Speakers: Catherine Gicheru; Katherine Hayhoe

Please connect with us using any of the below methods

Web – www.r-consortium.org

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/r-consortium/mycompany/

Twitter – @RConsortium