Jul 23

Beyond Case Counts: Making COVID-19 Clinical Data Available and Useful – Aug 13, 2020

By R Consortium Blog, Events

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

Registration and more info: https://covid19-data-forum.org

May 05

Love0

Helping R Community Events Go Virtual

By R Consortium Blog

The R Consortium helps provide all sorts of resources to projects, companies, and events to help build R infrastructure and expand the R community. We have given out grants over $1 million dollars to developers (and it’s a good time to prep for the next Fall Grant Cycle), we give funding to events and meetups through out R User Group (RUGs) program, we help fund the popular R-Ladies, which promotes diversity in the R community through meetups, mentorship and global collaboration and has 170+ groups worldwide, and much more.

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

From our blog on the selection process (“Virtual event suggestions for open source communities”).

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!

Nov 22

Love0

XI Conference of R Users (Madrid, Spain, Nov 14-16) Welcomes Over 200 Attendees

By R Consortium Blog, Events

Thank you to Carlos Ortega, Principal Data Scientist, Teradata, for providing this summary and pictures from the conference

The XI Conference of R Users (XI Jornadas de Usuarios de R), held November 14 – 16, Madrid, Spain, was organized by the Asociación Comunidad R Hispano. The ambitious program and the invited international speakers made the participation massive, exceeding 200 attendees. The Conference was divided into two locations, Repsol (Spanish Gas and Oil company) and UNED (Spanish Distance Learning University), highlighting the university-business combination that has been one of the key factors in the success of the conference.

On Thursday, November 14, the opening ceremony was held at the Repsol Campus auditorium and attended by Emilio López Cano (president of the Asociación Hispano R Community), Julio Gonzalo (deputy vice chancellor for research at UNED), Enrique Dameno (Director of Digitalization and Integrated Customer Management of Repsol), and Teresa García (Repsol).

Max Kuhn (R Studio) gave a lecture on “Modeling in the Tidyverse,” and after that, in the round table “R in business,” the crucial role of data scientists in solving problems in diverse areas was covered. Raúl Vaquerizo (Pont Group), Noelia Ruiz (Mutua Madrileña), Jorge Ayuso (Telefónica España), Enrique Lasso (Repsol) and Carlos Ortega (Teradata) participated in the round table.

On the 15th and 16th, at the School of Education of the UNED, an extensive and vibrant program was developed with workshops, communications sessions, “lightning sessions,” poster sessions, round tables and invited conferences. Bernd Bischl (University of Munich) gave a lecture on MLR3, Jo-Fai Chow (H2O.ai) presented “Automatic and explainable machine learning in R,” and Max Kuhn gave a workshop on “Designing R modeling packages.”

Following the multidisciplinary philosophy of using R to handle any kind of data, communications sessions dealt with applications in genetics, data analysis, model and project management, society and culture, surveys and education, medicine and veterinary and economics and company. In addition to these monographic sessions, the “lightning sessions” dealt with many different topics.

A round table on Data Journalism was held to close the conference, moderated by Leonardo Hansa (R-Hispano) in which Virginia Peón (Indigitall), Alba Martín (Newtral), Antonio Delgado (Datadista) and Carmen Aguilar (Sky News) participated. The importance of knowing how to treat the data in an appropriate and honest way was highlighted, so that information that reaches the public is truthful.

In the closing ceremony, the prize for the Best Young Work of the Conference was announced, which went to Rocío Aznar Gimeno (Technological Institute of Aragon) for the work “Multilevel mixed models: An application of the lme4 library to estimate the fetal weight percentile in twin pregnancies.”

Sessions Available

Many of the sessions were streamed and recorded. They are accessible through the UNED Channel (Canal UNED): https://canal.uned.es/series/5dc3f7d05578f252041fc22d