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Welcome!

Welcome to the R Consortium’s fifth newsletter. This quarterly newsletter puts together the latest updates about our organization’s activities, the progress each working group has made, upcoming R related events and recording of past events. In short, all you need to know about the R Consortium! We hope you enjoy it. 

Haven’t read previous newsletters? Find them here.

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Welcome to our newest member Parexel

Parexel is among the world’s largest clinical research organizations (CROs), providing Phase I to IV clinical development services to help life-saving treatments reach patients faster. Parexel has a team of more than 21,000 global professionals collaborating with biopharmaceutical leaders, emerging innovators, and sites to design and deliver clinical trials with patients in mind. Parexel uses R for a wide range of internal decision-making and regulatory interactions.


Announcing R/Medicine 2023 ⚕️

Join us at R/Medicine 2023! The 6th annual conference will be fully virtual June 5-9. R/Medicine provides a forum for sharing R based tools and approaches used to analyze and gain insights from health data. Conference workshops provide a way to learn and develop your R skills. Midweek demos allow you to try out new R packages and tools. The conference talks share new packages, and successes in analyzing health, laboratory, and clinical data with R and Shiny with a vigorous ongoing discussion with speakers. Learn more: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/r-medicine/ 


Catch up with RUGS (R useR Groups)

The 2023 RUGS CFP Program 📣

The R Consortium RUGS Program has grown from being a relatively modest R user group support program to being the primary vehicle for the R Consortium to award Social Infrastructure Grants. Social Infrastructure includes meetings, events, conferences and any other activity intended to strengthen social, organizational, and identity structures of the R Community. Interested in strengthening the social, organizational, and identity structures of the R Community?

The 2023 RUGS Program is open as of March 1, 2023 and close at midnight PST on September 30, 2023.

Learn more: https://www.r-consortium.org/all-projects/r-user-group-support-program

The ISC Call For Proposals 📣

The first ISC call for proposals is about to end, but it is not too early to plan for September. A major goal of the R Consortium is to strengthen and improve the infrastructure supporting the R Ecosystem. We seek to accomplish this by funding projects that will improve both technical infrastructure and social infrastructure. The first cycle for Call for Proposals is open until April 1st! Learn more: https://www.r-consortium.org/all-projects/call-for-proposals  

First Grant cycle

  • April 1, 2023 – Grant Application period closes, 11:59pm US ET
  • May 1, 2023 – All accepted grantees are contacted by the ISC
  • June 1, 2023 – Deadline for acceptance of grant and contract. Public notification of grantees occurs shortly thereafter.

💡 Learn more about the latest funded ISC Project: Kaizen (改善) Project for R Package Documentation 


Working groups updates

R Certification

R Certification WG has created a system for adding additional content to the exam. Subject Matter Experts may now review and add to the test bank in a secure manner. Test questions are currently being drafted for the beta-exam. With the help of the Linux Foundation, the team is working to set up a preliminary exam on the Certivision platform.Joseph Korszun joseph@procogia.com

Further information: https://github.com/RConsortium/R-Certification-WG

R Tables for Regulatory Submission (RTRS)

Work is proceeding on the Tables in Clinical Trials with R ebook. Additional table-generating packages are now represented, and a small number of additional representative tables have been added. This is still work in progress, but the community is invited to review it and comment. The working group intends to bring this document to completion before the end of the year and produce a first edition “published” version.Gabe Becker gabembecker@gmail.com
Adrian Waddell adrian.waddell@gene.com
Joseph Rickert joseph.rickert@rstudio.com
 
Working Group github repository: https://github.com/RConsortium/rtrs-wg

R Validation Hub

R Validation Hub at the R Adoption Series 
The R Validation Hub will be presenting on their recent Case Studies seminar series at the R Adoption Series. Join us for an overview of how the R Validation Hub guidance is being put into practice across many of our industry partners.
Andy Nicholls andyofsmeg@hotmail.com 
Doug Kelkhoff 
doug.kelkhoff@gmail.com
riskmetric app in action at ShinyConf 2023
Aaron Clark showed the {riskassessment} app at this year’s ShinyConf. The {riskassessment} app, built on the validation cornerstone {riskmetric} pkg, was presented at Shiny Conf 2023 last week in their shiny showcase among 20+ other great apps. Through the popular vote, our submission won the title of “Best App” at the conference! I just wanted to thank the dev team and everyone involved on this project over the years. If it’s been a while since you’ve test driven the app, click this link to demo and give us a few stars on GitHub!
Changing of the Guard at the R Validation Hub
After 4+ years at the helm of the R Validation Hub, Andy Nicholls is handing off the baton. We welcome Doug Kelkhoff who will be taking over as lead.

Submissions

The Pilot 2 submission which contains the Shiny app successfully passed through the FDA’s electronic gateway. However, an error in setting a parameter in the app caused population subsetting to propagate through the app in a manner that is not consistent with FDA practice. The FDA is very concerned about distinguishing between exploratory analysis and inferential analysis. Submission materials must be careful to adhere to guidelines for inferential analysis. The plan is to make some additional minor changes requested by the FDA and resubmit Pilot 2 before the FDA begins its formal written evaluation.
 
Pilot 3 which builds on the two previous pilots and includes constructing the ADaM datasets is proceeding in parallel with the Pilot 2 work.
 
Preliminary work on Pilot 4, which will investigate the use of container technology, is just beginning.
Ning Leng
leng.ning@gene.com
Further information: 
R Consortium Submissions WG GitHub

Repositories

The repositories working group has had two productive working sessions with the CRAN team and is planning a third session in the near future. The work is centered around making it possible for R-Hub to reproduce the exact testing environment used by CRAN. This is complex because the CRAN test environment is distributed among multiple servers which have different but overlapping test responsibilitiesJoseph Rickert
joseph.rickert@rstudio.com
Further information: see the minutes of the WG meeting which contains a link to a video of the meeting and the recent rOpenSci newsletter.

OOP

Cran Releases  
Created patches against base R to enable the CRAN release and submitted them to the R bugzilla, where they are currently under review and revision.
Michael Lawrence
Hadley Wickham
 
Further information:
https://github.com/RConsortium/OOP-WG

IDEA

IDEA is looking into revising the R Consortium’s code of conduct and working to identify R user groups around the world that might benefit from a satRdays event.samantha@posit.com

Upcoming events

SatRday – London

Join us in London for our SatRdays event hosted by Jumping Rivers.  

Date: April 22, 2023 • King’s College London, UK

Learn More

R/Medicine Virtual Conference

Join us at the 6th annual conference!

Date: June 5-9, 2023 • Virtual

Learn More

More R Events

  • R/Finance May 19-20, 2023,  University of Illinois at Chicago
  • New York R Conference – Summer 2023
  • Cascadia R ConferenceSaturday, August 19, 2023 
  • PAA 2023 – April 12-15, 2023, New Orleans, Louisiana 
  • (SDSS) 2023  – May 23–26, 2023, St. Louis, Missouri 
  • Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) – August 5 – 10, 2023, in Toronto, Canada
  • R Project Sprint August 30 – September 1, 2023, Warwick UK

You’ve missed a recent event?

R/Adoption Series: Learnings and Reflection from R Validation Case Studies
Juliane Manitz, Senior Expert Biostatistician at EMD Serono • Doug Kelkhoff, Principal Data Scientist / Statistical Software Engineer Principal Data Scientist at Roche • Uday Preetham Palukuru, Standards Lead at Merck &Co.  Learn More
Teal: An R-Shiny Framework to Unlock the Power of Interactive Data Exploration
Chendi Liao, Principal Statistical Programmer Analyst, Roche Canada • Dony Unardi, Principal Data Scientist, Genentech. Learn more
R Adoption Series: Introducing the Software Engineering Working Group and {mmrm}
Ben Arancibia, Data Scientist – Senior Manager At GSK • Yoni Sidi, Director of Modeling and Simulation at Sage Therapeutics. Learn more

We need you!

In this section, we highlight a few opportunities for getting more involved with the R Consortium. 

Help promote the R Consortium message around the globe

Participate in an R Consortium working group
 R in Business

  • (https://github.com/RConsortium/RBusiness), where the working group’s goal is to promote and support the R programming environment and the R ecosystem in business practices and business research
  • Development of a community-based collaboration platform
  • Organization and sponsorship of events
  • Research on relevant topics in the intersection of business/accounting and technology
  • Development of openly available courses/tutorials
  • Development and maintenance of R packages