Announcing R/Medicine 2022! The conference will be fully virtual from August 23 through 26 and feature two days of workshops (included with the low registration fee!) and two days of keynotes featuring JJ Allaire and Frank Harrell.
R / Medicine is the premier conference for the use of R in clinical practice and reflects the increasing importance of data science and machine learning to the everyday lives of physicians and other healthcare professionals. Topics include working with clinical data, statistical modeling, forecasting, reproducible research, clinical reporting, R package development and more. Check out some highlights from previous conferences on our YouTube channel!
Early Bird Registration is now open so sign up for the conference now! We are accepting proposals for 30 minute talks, 30 minute panel discussions, and 10 minute lighting talks.
Interested in sponsoring R/Medicine? Please take a look at our sponsorship brochure.
The R Consortium is pleased to announce the new 2022 R User Groups (RUGs), Conferences and Training program. This is an updated version of the RUGS program of previous years that aims to put more structure around the process of applying for support for R-themed conferences and training sessions.
The RUGS Program
The RUGS program supports R user groups and will operate in much the same way as the 2020 and 2021 RUGS programs. Because we are still all under the shadow of COVID-19, we expect user groups to hold on-line and/or in-person meetings.
RUGS grants will have two parts: Meetup.com support and cash grants. All user groups applying for the program, except for R-Ladies groups, will be automatically enrolled in our RUGS meetup.com RUGS Pro account. If you receive a grant, we will pay the meetup.com fees for your program for the year. R-Ladies has its own Meetup.com Pro account so you need to apply directly to R-Ladies to participate. Also note that if you are already participating in our RUGS meetup.com program and you are not seeking a cash grant, you do not need to reapply.
If you are seeking a cash grant for your user group, please be explicit about how much money you are seeking and what you intend to do with the funds. Be conservative, we need to make our pool of grant money cover the entire globe. All RUGS including R-Ladies groups are eligible to apply for cash grants.
Conference Grants
Formerly, the RUGs program was intended only for small conferences where all cash grants were limited to $1000. While $1000 is still the limit for small events, now there is a place on the enrollment form to seek funding for larger conferences. Of course, the more funds you are seeking the more justification you must provide about how your conference will benefit the R Community. Please do not apply for a conference grant until your conference website is up.
Training Sessions
Training sessions are a new category this year. Previously we treated training sessions as conferences. We realize conferences and training sessions are very different and that training sessions should be judged with their own set of criteria.
For details on requirements for each type of grant, visit the R User Groups, Conferences, and Training page on the R Consortium website and select “RUGs Program” under the Projects tab at the top of the R Consortium home page. Be sure to check the correct box on the application form.
The RUGS, Conferences and Training program for 2022 will be accepting requests for funding through the end of September 2022.
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.
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.
By Samantha Toet, Derrick Kearney, Sydeaka Watson, Gwynn Sturdevant, Kevin O’Brien, and Joe Rickert
We’re trying something new and we want your support.
One of the goals of the R-Consortium Diversity and Inclusion project is for R Consortium-affiliated events to be more representative of the wider R community. As a result, we put together a community form for you to nominate your peers to speak at upcoming R Community events. This is a great way to promote the work that your colleagues are doing, and draw speakers from varying levels of expertise.
We are working with several R-related conferences and events that are seeking recommendations for knowledgeable and engaging speakers on topics that are of interest to the R Community. Our aim is to encourage speakers from diverse backgrounds to consider speaking at R events, and we would like to build a platform to bring these potential speakers to the attention of conference program committees.
About the R-Consortium R Community Diversity & Inclusion Project
The goal of the R Community Diversity and Inclusion Project (RCDI) is to broadly consider how the R Consortium can best encourage and support diversity and inclusion across a variety of events and platforms. Anyone is welcome to join our team, and you can find more information about joining here: https://github.com/RConsortium/RCDI-WG
The second COVID-19 Data Forum, co-sponsored by the Stanford Data Science Institute and the R Consortium, was held August 13, 2020. This series of forums brings together experts working to collect and curate data needed to drive scientific research and formulate effective public health responses to the pandemic.
The forum utilized Zoom as the video platform and allowed keynote speakers to present, as well as interact during a Q&A session.
The moderator was Sherri Rose, an associate professor at Stanford University in the Center for Health Policy and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research and Co-Director of the Health Policy Data Science Lab.
Speakers covered topics such as current issues facing researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic such as data sharing or research duplication, how phenotype impacts severity of cases, and data inequality for under-serviced communities. Speakers also answered questions from the moderator and the chat about their work and ways individuals can get involved at all R literacy levels.
This fall, the R Consortium’s support for advancing data science in medicine continues with the third of three exceptional events, pulling together experts in their fields, including the Covid-19 Data Forum, R/Medicine, and R/Pharma.
What is R/Pharma?
R/Pharma is an ISC working group under the R Consortium. The entire event is a community-lead effort and 100% volunteer run. R/Pharma is vendor neutral and very much an academic conference. Harvard has been very helpful in hosting the event.
August 27-29, 5:30am PDT / 8:30am EDT / 2:30pm CEST – Register now!
Brought to you by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Yale School of Public Health, and the R Consortium, the R/Medicine conference encourages the adoption of statistical modeling and reproducible data processing in clinical practice.
R is the gold standard in reproducible research in academia and industry and has powerful capabilities to create highly-customizable interactive analytic dashboards, as well as predictive models that employ machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence.
Presentations will showcase how the R ecosystem is currently leveraged in medical applications including clinical trial design and analysis, personalized medicine, the development of machine learning models using laboratory and patient record data, and reproducible research.
Thurs, August 13th, 9am PDT/12pm EDT/18:00 CEST – Register now!
Hosted by the COVID-19 Data Forum/Stanford Data Science Initiative/R Consortium
COVID-19 is the first pandemic to occur in the age of open data. Public health agencies around the world are releasing case counts to the public, and scientists are providing analyses and forecasts in real-time. However, the content of this data has so far been limited to simple metrics like cases, deaths, and hospitalizations at coarse geographic and demographic scales. To drive the next phase of COVID-19, scientists need access to higher-dimensional patient-level data, so we can understand how the virus causes disease, why are some more at risk than others, when and how is transmission occurring, what therapeutics are more likely to work, and what healthcare resources are being used. But sharing such data brings up tremendous challenges in terms of patient privacy and data standardization. The COVID-19 Data Forum, a collaboration between Stanford University and the R Consortium, is hosting the event “Beyond case counts: Making COVID-19 clinical data available and useful” to push the conversation forward on these issues. The event will include talks by representatives from international collaborative teams who are working to collect and share detailed clinical and biological data from individuals with COVID-19. The event will be open to the public, and is part of a continuing series focusing on data-related aspects of the scientific response to the pandemic.
Speakers include:
Jenna Reps, Observational Health Data Sciences & Informatics (OHDSI) Consortium /Janssen R&D
Andrea Ganna, COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative/Harvard Medical School/Finland Institute for Molecular Medicine
Ken Massey, EndPandemic National Data Consortium/Saama Technologies
Ryan Tibshirani, DELPHI epidemic forecasting group/Dept of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
At the Linux Foundation, we have been studying robust, scalable virtual events platforms that we can not only use for our own R Consortium events, but that we could extend as a resource to the R community.
Here is the current state of our evaluation. We’ve covered 86 virtual event platforms, and come up with a list of 4 finalists. Since specific circumstances and goals for events will always vary, we expect that there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution.
The four finalists are:
inXpo Intrado
Best for large events with high budgets requiring a virtual conference experience with few compromises
vFAIRS
Best for medium to large events with smaller budgets that want to offer a 3D environment/booth experience
MeetingPlay
Best for any size event where attendee networking tools are a priority and sponsor ‘booths’ aren’t required
QiQo Chat
QiQo is best for smaller technical gatherings that don’t need all the bells and whistles of an industry event focus, a great option for developer meetings and hackathons
The good news is that for those events that can no longer safely take place in person, virtual events still offer the opportunity to connect within our communities to share valuable information and collaborate. While not as powerful as a face-to-face gathering, a variety of virtual event platforms available today offer a plethora of features that can get us as close as possible to those invaluable in-person experiences. Thanks to our community members, we’ve received suggestions for platforms and services that the events team has spent the past several weeks evaluating.
After researching a large number of possibilities over the last few weeks, the Linux Foundation has identified four virtual event platforms (and a small-scale developer meeting tool) that could serve the variety of needs within our diverse project communities. Our goal was to determine the best options that capture as much of the real-world experience as we can in a virtual environment for virtual gatherings ranging from large to small.
If you are considering a virtual alternative for your R community meetup or event, please contact us. We may be able to help!
