In this session we will be looking at various learnings obtained from creating a corporate R infrastructure and developing R packages to address the unique business problems presented by clinical trials.
Architecting and maintaining an R installation across a large organisation can be challenging. How do you balance between giving individual users the ability to meet their specific needs, but also provide a standardised environment which meets regulatory requirements? As R needs expand, then internal packages also get created, and these also need to be managed.
It is often useful to create custom R packages to complement the community R packages. We are developing both open and closed source packages that we validate and deploy on our R infrastructure. We will be discussing some learnings from the NEST software development team including: project management, automation, devops, testing, integration, releasing, validation, and deployment of the in-house built R packages. We will also be presenting steps we took towards simplifying the development process to enable co-creation and collaboration with internal and external developers.
Finally, we will split into break out rooms to discuss some relevant topics on how package creation and management can be dealt with effectively.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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!
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.
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.
SP: For the same reason as the above, my favorites are “Code Coverage,” “Distributed Computing” and “R / Business.”
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?
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?
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!
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.
Summary: In this presentation, Andy Nicholls, Head of Data Science within GSK Biostatistics, provided an overview of GSK’s WARP environment for Biostatistics. The presentation described the key requirements that led to building the environment and included an overview of the basic technical components that enabled these requirements. Nicholls also discussed GSK support and maintenance strategy for R and R packages.
The presentation touched upon important topics that fed into the discussion:
Support and maintenance strategy for R
Controlled execution of R (GxP workflows)
In-house vs cloud infrastructure
Schedule
Intro – 10 mins
Case Study presentation: Scaling R at GSK – 45 mins (including 10 mins for Q&A)
Break – 5 mins
Parallel discussions – 45 mins
Speaker
Andy Nicholls is Head of Data Science within GSK Biostatistics. He has been a user and strong advocate for the use of R for over 15 years. Andy is responsible for driving the R adoption initiative within GSK Biostatistics. His team helped create Biostatistics’ first dedicated analytics platform for R and developed a world-wide R training programming. The team has also led the development of several R-based tools and applications to assist the rollout and adoption of R as a clinical and non-clinical reporting capability. Within the wider industry, Andy is the lead for the R Validation Hub, a collaboration to support the adoption of R within a biopharmaceutical regulation setting.
Andy has an MMath degree from University of Bath and MSc Statistics with Applications in Medicine from University of Southampton. Prior to re-joining GSK in 2017 Andy was the Head of Data Science Consultancy at Mango Solutions.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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!
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
R Consortium talks to Yanina Bellini Saibene, Riva Quiroga, and Natalia da Silva on starting up a conference in Latin America, the importance of networking, and some of the difficulties that some people have in different parts of the world.
RC: What is the R community like in LatinR?
NDS: We are growing fast. Under new initiatives, we have grown to over 45 R-Ladies chapters in Latin America. We are now having conferences in Latin America like LatinR, SER in Brazil, and more.
RQ: Many people thought they were all alone. LatinR and different conferences have shown that the groups are connected. We met online without meeting in person. This was possible because we had connections through R-Ladies. This allows those connections to become visible, both in communities and in a broad region. It is growing very fast. For many people, LatinR was their first contact with the R community, and from there they created RUG in their community or started projects.
NDS: The first LatinR was in 2018 in Buenos Aires in 2019 was in Chile. We hope to have 2020 in Montevideo but were unable to due to COVID. We ended up doing so virtually.
RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
NDS: The pandemic situation has made it very difficult. LatinR is done with volunteering, and everyone had a lot of things going on. It was difficult to find time to organize a conference in this situation but we did it. In the end, we had a great conference and we got more people involved in the R community.
RQ: I think another problem has to do with sponsors. If you are organizing an in-person conference, sponsors get something. They have a space for giving away swag or give a talk, so they can feel the people are getting something for their money. And that is not as easy in a virtual event. It’s not as easy.
NDS: Not just not easy, it’s impossible to find one for these conferences. The only way that LatinR has survived is because of volunteering.
RQ: Because it’s virtual, we don’t want to charge people for attending the conference. So not too many institutions can give us help for organizing the conference.
YS: However, R Consortium has helped us. They let us use zoom for hosting the last three days of LatinR. It was a way to help where we didn’t have to pay for it out of our pocket.
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?
NDS: We used slack to organize the conference. We are also very active on Twitter. It’s basically for promotion and to figure out what is going on. We also have a web page that has a lot of information. We also use Github to share information from previous conferences as well as the presentations. We also have a youtube channel with different presentations. That is the way that we are organizing the materials, by combining all of these tools.
RQ: Slack is also a social space for the members to gather. It’s not only for the organizing team but also for the people who want to attend the conference as well as for people who have attended before. They can participate, ask questions, or how to prepare for R Conferences. Not just for LatinR, but other conferences like the R Studio Conference. It helps because if you want to give a talk at a conference you can go to the channel and talk to the committee and they can give you some feedback. It’s also a space that is used not just for organizing LatinR but also throughout the year. During the conference, we didn’t have a live stream, but we did have a live Q and A panel where we were able to ask questions.
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?
YS: The fact that we had the conference here and brought some rockstar names from the R community to this part of the world is another huge benefit for South America. We had Alison Presmanes Hill and Maëlle Salmon for the last conference. We had a lot more talks, about reproducibility, data science, and more. It’s all volunteer work and we are proud because it’s done by hand. The fact that these people come and see the community that comes here is amazing.
NDS: Having these people here shows that we can get anyone. Right now, with COVID it’s not quite the same. It’s a lot easier for them as well as us. But, if we can get them in person, the effect will be much bigger on the community. That would be something important for us and the community as well.
RQ: And these talks were useful given the context. Maëlle Salmon gave a talk on making your website using distill. Alison Hill gave a talk about how to learn new things and that was impactful for people who were alone in their home and didn’t have a community in real-life spaces. It was really important because it was something that impacted their lives. We have tried to invite people who will talk about things that are important for our region. For example, when Hadly Wickman we asked him to run a workshop on how to make an R package. The idea is that having more people in our region making R packages for the community. More people after the workshop sent their packages to CRAN and had their packages published. It was really interesting, because that workshop was in 2019, and last year we had people who presented packages that they produced because of the workshop. We are trying to think strategically, what people can do that will help the community and help others.
NDS: I think, overall, we had an impact on package production for the R community after this workshop.
YS: Also, the tutorials we did last year. In Buenos Aires and Chile we had tutorials. Last year we were able to have more because of the virtual part. We had the first two in Spanish and English. Last year we were able to do it in Portuguese. We were also able to have people certified as RStudio and Carpentries instructors teaching the tutorials which allow us to have nice, high-quality tutorials. This shows that people from our region can give quality training in R. We like to say that we are not just a conference, but rather a community. The conference is a way for us to see each other and show what we have been doing since the last time. What works and what doesn’t work as well as concerns in the community.
RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
NDS: I think that R is changing and we have to pay a lot of attention. Right now, R Studio is involved in the R Community and is taking a more major role in the community. All these changes mean that we have to be kept up to date. We cannot go to sleep and think that the world has changed. We need to keep inviting people to our conference to keep our community up to date. In terms of the day, R Studio is a companion. People are also using the Tidyverse, and you have to keep learning this all the time. I think that there will be some confusion between R and R studio making sure that the programs work well together.
YS: We have a really big player in R Studio and they lead some of the changes because they make good tools. And we use that tools. But they are a company. We need to make sure that we have a strong community that can ensure that R Studio pays attention to the wants of the community. For instance, more people want better accessibility in R, so we need to make sure that R Studio works on this as well. We need to have a balance because they are using an open-source language.
NDS: Maybe we need to make sure that we are teaching in R and not just in R Studio. Because R came first and is open-sourced and no company runs it.
YS: I think that R Studio needs to be held accountable. One thing that I’m happy about is that the R Community has standards. For instance, the data camps, R-Ladies, Africa R, and others give people the space to discuss and feel safe doing so.
RQ: We have to be very careful about what we want to showcase at the conference. Right now, the pipe being in the base is the new thing. We are talking about do we want to use it, how will we do it. This is on the top of our list because there are no resources in Spanish or Portuguese to learn the pipe. Some people are blogging on it. We want to be up-to-date in R Base, Tidyverse, DataTable, etc. We want to show people a variety of ways to do something. So if you use R Base, we need to offer this. If you are involved in Tidyverse and Tidymodels, we need to offer that. If you are a Data Table user, we need to offer that as well. Offering those different ways to address the same problem. Even though there are major players that may have a way to do things simply, we have to be aware that some people may not be able to use them. This is why we need to offer a wide variety of approaches to the same problem.
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?
RQ: People from Datasketch, a company from Bogota, Columbia, started making tools for data journalists for people to use without using R. They made a lot of shiny apps for people to use. If you have data you can upload the data, get a plot, and put it in your report. They are doing a lot. They ran a crowdsource a couple of years ago. They presented their shiny apps in 2019 and 2020. Mostly they are used by data journalists in Latin America. They are also organizing meetups.
YS: We also have some people from Politics who are building a package that analyzes speeches.
NDS: In this field, there are people from Argentina and Uruguay who are working on similar packages who are making packages to analyze this type of data.
RQ: We have both people doing data journalism as well as people making packages that would help people do their job.
RC: When is your next event? Please give details!
NDS: LatinR will be on November 10-12 and the previous week we will have workshops. Right now we are doing calls for papers till July 31.
RQ: People can present in Spanish, Portuguese, or English. We are very open in terms of language. We are a trilingual conference so people can present in any of those languages.
YS: R-Ladies. That’s an easy question. For me, R-Ladies changed my life. It is amazing.
RQ: Because of R-Ladies we were able to meet each other and started organizing a conference.
NDS: We exist because of R-Ladies. Without R-Ladies, LatinR would not be and we would never have met.
YS: And a lot of people from the organizing team are from R-Ladies. And a lot of the other user groups have R-Ladies members in them.
RQ: It has been easier to invite people to the conference because of the R-Ladies network. It was very difficult to ask people about a conference that has never happened before. We asked Jenny Bryan, and she said yes I think because we asked through the R-Ladies channels.
NDS: Certification would be a good one to do. TO have a common certification program would be very important. Also, this would be good for academics as well as work. Maybe if they have some sort of certification is good.
RQ: Currently, the only way to show that you know anything about R is to take the R Studio certification and pay for that. There is no way that you can prove that you know anything. Maybe your Github would be a way to show that you know something.
NDS: Maybe you can show your Github account and show people your work and what you can do.
RQ: Having an R certification would be great!
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?
NDS: Something about diversity. The language barrier is hard. We have different barriers other than language. You have support for a conference, but it’s not the same for us in Latin America. Each country has its problems. Maybe different areas need different types of support.
YS: Yes. Something as simple as getting reimbursed is different in Latin America. It’s really hard for us. It took me 12 months to get a check for $97 for my chapter of R-Ladies. And I had to pay taxes and pay to get it. This is something that people don’t realize. This is something that you don’t know if you don’t live here. Not all countries in Latin America has post mail for instance. Some of them have a central post office where you would have to travel to receive your post, pick it up and pay for it. While other countries in the region may have it. I have to pay a notary, go through customs, and more to get a shirt that someone sent me. These are the types of issues that we deal with. If you want to help people, you need to listen to us. You need to listen to people from this region in the places where decisions make. The effort has to make by the R Consortium to make these changes. I already have to work 3 or 4 times as much. I have to learn another language, be able to understand your language, and I have to try to speak it in a way that could be understood. We cannot afford to work on the process as well. A way to streamline support will help us immensely.
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!
