Welcome!

Welcome to the R Consortium’s third newsletter. This quarterly newsletter puts together the latest updates about our organization’s activities, the progress each working groups 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. 

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A. What’s happening in the R Consortium?

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• Community Call to Action for ISC Grant Proposal Ideas – A major goal of the R Consortium is to strengthen and improve the infrastructure supporting the R Ecosystem. We fund projects that will improve both technical infrastructure and social infrastructure. Every year the deadlines are October 1 and April 1. Please consider applying!
• On September 7, Joseph Rickert spoke at the FDASCD Conference about R, the R Community and the challenges of open source. The session about open source generated 300 live views and 140 on demand views.  videos available
• We talk with R Users Groups around the world every week. Recently, we’ve talked with the SoCal R useR Group, Vienna<-R, R Users Group Gainesville, and many more!
• We hosted our first virtual satRdays Francophone event Aug 6th.
• satRdays website will now be administered by the R Consortium. The Marketing Committee is looking for help with upgrading the satRdays conference infrastructure. We need someone to take the existing underlying software (the Hugo templates) and upgrade it so that it is easier for satRdays conference organizers to spin up websites of their events. 
• The first R/Insurance event, “Upskilling on Data Handling and Communication at Swiss Re,” will take place on October 27th! Swiss Re has a community-based initiative, the Atelier program, helping the community upskill while solving real-world business-as-usual problems with actuarial data handling and communication skills. More info here.

🏆 In July, the R Adoption Series with three FDA speakers reached a record number of 600 attendees! Check the recording here.

B. From the Boardroom

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• Mike Smith of Pfizer was recently elected to the Silver member seat on the Board of Directors recently vacated by former Google employee, Chris Chapman. Welcome Mike!! 
• We thank Chris for his service, his good counsel, and his efforts to help Google employees engage with the R Consortium.
• The Board of Directors recently voted to amend the By-laws of the R Consortium to expand the membership on the Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) to include as many seats for Silver member representatives as there are Silver member directors serving on the Board. At the present membership levels, this will increase ISC membership by two individuals.
• Silver members are presently voting to fill three seats on the ISC, the two new seats described above, and the seat recently vacated by Orhun Aydin when he resigned from ESRI.
• We thank Orhun for his efforts to promote the use of R for spatial statistics which he will surely continue in his new position at St Louis University.
• The Board recently sent a proposal to the R Foundation explaining how the R Consortium, in collaboration with the Linux Foundation’s Events Team, could help with the production and logistical management of future useR! conferences. The R Foundation is considering the proposal and preliminary discussions are underway.

C. Working groups updates

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R/Business

Topic	Content	Contact for details
R/Business focuses on insurance and accounting.	Dr. Maria Prokofieva has recently published two posts on the RStudio R Views blog to promote the interest in insurance and accounting applications of R. See Looking at cash flows and R is for actuaRies.	Maria Prokofieva Maria.Prokofieva@vu.edu.au Further information:https://github.com/RConsortium/RBusiness

R Certification

Topic	Content	Contact for details
Exam Levels and Prep	Exam level documentation created for various levels of R Certification. Question clean up and exam preparation started.	Joseph Korszun joseph@procogia.com Further information: https://github.com/RConsortium/R-Certification-WG

R/Medicine

Topic	Content	Contact for details
R/Medicine Virtual Conference Wrap-Up	The R/Medicine Virtual Conference was hosted at the end of August with 2 days of hands-on workshops and 2 days of sessions.  Watch all of the workshops and sessions on demand.  The event has almost 500 registrations with a 65% attendance rate. We were pleased to offer 43 registration scholarships. Thanks to all of the speakers, sponsors, and planning committee for a successful event!	r-medicine-conf@r-consortium.org

R Tables for Regulatory Submission (RTRS) 

Topic	Content	Contact for details
Work continues on the Tables Book	The RTRS WG has begun adding archetypal example table and continues to add information about table-creation R packages to the tables book, while investigating possible synergies with other pharma affiliated organizations such as the TFL Designer Virtual Workshop, a COSA-approved open-source  project investigating TFL metadata.	Gabe Becker gabembecker@gmail.comAdrian Waddell adrian.waddell@gene.comJoseph Rickert joseph.rickert@rstudio.com Working Group github repository: https://github.com/RConsortium/rtrs-wg

R Validation Hub

Topic	Content	Contact for details
New direction for risk tools	Following a successful run of case studies earlier in the year, the R Validation Hub Exec have turned our attention toward the future of our infrastructure projects.  We are now working on a joint development path for {riskmetric} and the Risk Assessment application with the new respective leaders of the sub teams: Eli Miller and Aaron Clark.  We have also started pulling together an outline for a new sub team to look at the idea of a central package repository and expect this to be announced to the wider group members in the coming weeks.	Andy Nicholls andyofsmeg@hotmail.com

Submissions

Topic	Content	Contact for details
Pilot 2 submission to FDA will be submitted in Oct	The pilot 2 submission will be submitted to FDA in Oct. In pilot 2, a shiny app will be submitted to assist FDA staff’s review. Preliminary materials can be found here	Ning Leng leng.ning@gene.com Further information: https://github.com/RConsortium/submissions-wg
The R Consortium R submissions WG presented at the ASA biopharma regulatory industry workshop in DC. Upcoming presentation: Rpharma 2022

Repositories

Topic	Content	Contact for details
The Repositories working group has begun a dialog with CRAN	The Repositories Working group recently sent a proposal to CRAN with ideas for better aligning the package tests implemented on the R-Hub package build platform with the package checks conducted by CRAN. The proposal along with responses from CRAN team members is available here.	Joseph 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

Topic	Content	Contact for details
CRAN Release of the R7 package (final name TBD)	Thanks to Hadley, the package implementing the design developed by the working group is ready for CRAN release contingent on some minor internal changes to R. Michael was planning to discuss those changes with the rest of R core in Vienna. Broader adoption driven by the CRAN release will enable us to evolve the package with the eventual goal of merging it into the base R distribution.	Michael LawrenceHadley Wickham Further information: https://github.com/RConsortium/OOP-WG

D. Upcoming events

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Four years ago Swiss Re set out for its actuarial community two ‘capability building’ objectives, to improve actuarial data handling and communication skills. We launched a community-based initiative, the Atelier program, helping each other upskill whilst solving real-world business-as-usual problems. In this session, we will share our approach to upskilling for data analytics before we dive into an example of how to create automated (and stunning) actuarial reports. 

E. You’ve missed a recent event?

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• R Adoption Series
  • September 29, Virtual
  • The R Consortium invited two Pharmaceutical organizations to share their experience in leveraging metadata for automation pieces of the clinical delivery workflow. This session starts with Christina Fillmore using Open Source R packages {metacore} and {metatools} for creating metadata objects and enhancing columns in existing datasets. Following Christina, Yujie Zhao and Keaven Anderson will discuss {metalite} which is used to define a unified data structure to save metadata information for analysis & reporting (A&R) based on ADaM datasets in clinical trial development. 
  • More information
• FDA 10th Annual Scientific Computing Days Conference
  • Joseph Rickert gave an invited talk that began with a short review of the social history of R, made the case that R is much more than just another computing language, and looked forward to a possible future for R as the R Community navigates the challenges of facing open source projects. The videos of the two-day event are available here: 
  • More Information
• R/Medicine
  • August 23-26, Virtual
  • An international conference with a devoted following, explores the use of R based statistics and data science tools to improve clinical research and practice. J.J. Allaire and Frank Harrell will deliver keynotes.
  • Recording
• IDEA, The R Consortium working group on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility 
  • August 6, Virtual
  • We hosted our first virtual SatRdays Francophone Conference, which focused on using R for data science and epidemiology. We had four expert speakers join us:  Ehouman Evans (Reproducible Research with R), Marie Ruth DAGO (Intro to K Means Classification with R), and Aminata Ndiaye and Bryan Tegomoh (R in Epidemiology), with Mouna Belaid (R-Ladies Paris) hosting. We had 75 registrants and 23 participants, and the event was held in French. 
  • Recording (Passcode: &6b?y0k3)
• Rstudio::conf 2022
  • July 25-28, Washington DC
  • A conference to connect, learn and celebrate all things R and RStudio! Sharpen your skills and celebrate the R Community together with an array of workshops and an inspiring lineup of speakers. 
  • Recording
• R Adoption Series “Using R in regulatory review”: 
  • July 13, Virtual
  • In this R adoption seminar, we will invite three FDA staff sharing their experiences in using R in regulatory review. The session will start with Tae Hyun (Ryan) Jung sharing his experience in reviewing an R-based sNDA submission as a statistical reviewer. Following Ryan’s presentation, Hyo Soo Cho will share her experience in reviewing the submission pilot 1 conducted by the R consortium R submission working group. The last section of this event will be a panel discussion between Tae Hyun (Ryan) Jung, Hye Soo Cho and Paul Schuette. The audience will also have the opportunity to ask questions through the live poll during the event.
  • Recording

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We need you!

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