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Stephan Kadauke from R/Medicine talks to R Consortium about Racial Bias

By Blog, Events

Stephan Kadauke, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology and Lab Medicine. He runs the Cell and Gene Therapy Lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and also sees patients on the Apheresis service. As the Lead of the Cell and Gene Therapy Data Operations team, he has implemented several apps that are being used internally for clinical operations. He co-founded the CHOP R User Group, and he is the chair of the R/Medicine Organizing Committee.

R Consortium talks to Stephan Kadauke on the topic of Racial bias in algorithms. We also talk about how an overarching collaboration of R/Medicine and R in Pharma may help solve some difficult problems facing those in healthcare who use the R ecosystem.

RC: What is the R community like for R/Medicine?

The odd thing is that we are not all R programmers and we are not all health care professionals. After the R/Medicine 2020 conference, we looked at the demographics of our attendees and found out that 16% were practicing physicians. So a large contingent of our community actually takes care of patients. It’s also pretty international! Because of COVID, we switched from in-person to virtual in 2020. The previous two years, we had the R/Medicine conference at Yale (in New Haven, CT), then in Boston. We had about 100 people attend both of these. In 2020 we went virtual and grew five-fold, had participants from 43 different countries, and 1/3 of attendees were international. R/Medicine went global. 

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

Things have changed and for better or worse they aren’t going back. We can’t have an exclusively US-centric conference anymore. I missed the interpersonal connections of a real live in-person event, and we did have virtual Birds-of-a-Feather sessions in Zoom breakout rooms, but there is only so much you can do to try to replicate the in-person experience. For our next event, we plan on using a platform that helps with these interactions, but nothing approximates the in-person experience. Of course, we don’t want to do this in a way that loses the virtual experience or the global community. This is a very difficult situation and one we haven’t resolved. Once the COVID pandemic is history, it would be really cool to do a hybrid-distributive conference where there are lots of small watch parties in various places to have a virtual and in-person event globally. I don’t know if we will pull it off but that would be awesome.

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?  

For R/Medicine 2020 we used Crowdcast. I think Crowdcast is awesome. Compared to some other programs, Crowdcast is more limited because you don’t have an exhibit hall, multitrack, poster board, and those types of things. Instead, everyone is dropped into a single track video stream with a chat window on the side. By removing degrees of freedom there’s fewer user experience possibilities to consider for the org committee, and it also tends to lead to a more cohesive feeling for the participants. I was a big fan of using Crowdcast and we will use it again this year. For the Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, we used Zoom, which worked OK. For 2021, we’re looking into an alternative platform that does a better job allowing the kinds of chance or planned encounters and interactions that happen at a real live conference. Behind the scenes communication is super important too. We used a closed Slack channel, which was efficient for conference planning and putting out fires when necessary. Much of the planning relied on Google Docs. This stack I think is pretty common in planning online conferences these days.

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? 

Racial bias in medicine is such an important issue, especially when you’re using the electronic health record to feed predictive models that will have some kind of downstream effect on patient care. Both of our keynotes for R/Medicine 2021 will discuss this topic. There’s a paper in Science that looked at a widely used algorithm that is supposed to identify patients who are at high risk for disease and need extra care. They found that the algorithm disproportionately selects White patients for extra help, and if you’re Black you’re on average much sicker to be selected. This is because the algorithm used health costs as a proxy for health needs, and because less money is spent on Black patients, it falsely concludes that Black patients are healthier than equally sick White patients. This is insane, and probably just the tip of the iceberg. But algorithmic equity really is a hard problem! For example, do you want your algorithm to consider a person’s race or not? It may seem to make sense that you want it to be color-blind, but then you can’t correct for biases embedded in the training data. Another issue is the trade-off between accuracy and fairness. Predictive algorithms nowadays exclusively optimize for predictive accuracy. How can we make them consider measures of fairness? This is something that Michael Kearns discusses in his book The Ethical Algorithm but something that we aren’t talking about in mainstream AI yet. You can mathematically define equity, and you can design your algorithm so it optimizes for a specific trade-off between accuracy and equity. We need to talk about this. I want people to get more fired up about this. I think the R community is one of the wokest communities. We should be the leaders in ethical AI! When will tidymodels support socially aware modeling? There are so many fields where algorithmic bias can screw with people’s lives. Cathy O’Neil did an awesome job capturing this in her book Weapons of Math Destruction, which is both amazing and depressing at the same time… to see where machine learning algorithms are systematically discriminating against minorities in law enforcement, lending, and health care. Especially in health care where we “first do no harm”!

RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?

How do you put R into production? How do you make clinical-grade R applications? There are some major efforts trying to establish standards and guidelines, both for software engineering and validation, and this will really help, but as of yet there isn’t a consensus. This year, we are trying to gather ideas from people in the field who are thinking about this professionally. We’re planning to have a fireside chat with folks who have made R based applications that undergo regulatory scrutiny and folks who made frameworks for production-grade Shiny apps. Hopefully, eventually we’ll be able to offer a workshop to package some of these best practices into a teachable format. We hope this will lower the bar for creating good clinical software. 

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

R/Medicine 2021 will be held August 24-27. The org committee is working full steam on the program and logistics as we speak. R consortium is helping tons with that as well as the Linux Foundation. We will have two days of workshops and two days of presentations. This will be all virtual. Registration is open now, and it’s all-inclusive, with all workshops and videos, for $50. If you are an Academic it will be $25. All students and trainees can attend for $10. If this price point presents a financial hardship, we can talk about that as well. We are trying our best to keep the barrier low for attending. I’m biased, of course, but I think it’ll be an awesome event – we have some great workshops, keynotes, and sessions lined up!  

RC: Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium,  do you have a favorite project?  Why is it your favorite?

I’m a big fan of R Validation Hub! Validation is really important when it comes to clinical software – you really have to be able to show, to a reasonable degree, that what you think your software does is what it actually does. Another important part is software engineering for reliability, scale, and usability. When we think about best practices, we think about software engineering as well as validation, and how we bring those together is an important question.

RC: Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite?  Why is it your favorite?

I am a big fan of R in Pharma. The R in Pharma conference last year was amazing and had tons of great workshops and speakers. Thematically, R/Medicine is really well aligned with R Pharma. Of course not all of medicine is pharma, and arguably not all of pharma is medicine, but we do have a lot of overlap.

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?

I would love to have an “R in Healthcare” project and working group to capture some of the synergies between the R/Medicine and R in Pharma communities. This working group could hammer out some of the issues that are shared between pharma and medicine, which includes the question of how to build R based apps that can withstand regulatory scrutiny as well as some of the important societal issues with algorithmic bias that we talked about earlier. I think the funding could also go to fill some of the gaps in the R ecosystem that healthcare researchers face – for example, building CONSORT diagrams with ggplot2, or creating a high-level functionality to de-identify sensitive microdata. It would be great to have R Consortium funding for one or two engineers building open-source solutions here. 

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 Conferences that Serve a Diverse Population

By Blog, Events

The R Conference has been able to thrive with the changes that have occurred due to COVID. They also are planning for life post-COVID, with the lessons that they have learned from a digital world working their way into how they organize conferences going forward. R Consortium talked to Jared Lander about the issues with online conferences, how they have seen increased attendance, and how they will incorporate them into a new hybrid system.

RC: What is the R community like at the R conferences in New York and DC?

Each conference is a microcosm of the area that they are located in. We see all fields at the conference since all groups come together. 

For the New York conference, it’s mostly people from the metro area, but since New York City is a hub people will stop by and attend. People are always visiting beyond the geographic area. People from Europe come and talk. We get a lot of people we wouldn’t otherwise because it’s a hub. 

The DC conference is a government conference. It’s a way to focus on the DC community and their interests. It focuses on government and public life. Military talking about military matters. Intelligence offers to talk about working behind a secure network. Economists doing economic data. And teachers talking about how to analyze student data.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

We used Hopin for the conference. This was a real resource drain for a lot of the attendees. I needed to run two computers to keep it going. We had to instruct people to turn off all other programs and run Zoom from the browser. It worked decently, had a good stage area, a good chat room. However, our conference has always been very lively. We normally had walk-on music for the conference. We had a visiting professor tell students at the conference to not expect this at any other conference and that this one is not normal. 

To try to replicate that at the virtual conference I played walk-on music through my speakers. It was okay. We were able to get a mathematical comedian at the conference to attend, we were able to get a whiskey and rum producer to give a lesson on it and give them a discount on the products. 

Usually, the speakers are local people or companies that let people travel to give talks. When we went virtual we could get a lot more people. We got Rob Hyman to give a talk because he could. Going forward, we plan on doing a hybrid approach so that people can attend anywhere. 

All of our content is available on our website.

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? 

Andrew Gelman was great. He went up there with no slides and talked for 40 minutes. He is the only person I know of who could do that. This talk was on open science and how to make it work. You need to publish your data, methods, and code to make this work.

For the government conference, there was Graciela Chichilnisky, who gave a talk about carbon offsets and went over how they helped at the time and how they would work going forward. She went over how carbon offsets can save you money and help the climate at the same time.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

The New York Conference is going to be September 8-10 and will be HYBRID! We will have speakers announced soon. We have 8 to 10 planned right now. We are very excited. It’s going to be in Midtown East, and it will be online as well. Our R in government will be in-person and virtual also and will be held in early December but no dates yet.

RC: Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium,  do you have a favorite project?  Why is it your favorite?

CVXR is such a nice way to do optimization methods, and it’s so explainable, and it can do quasi complex programming and not just linear programming.

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?

I would like to add something that would allow vendors to support R better. We have people like database companies and people like Nvidia who have APIs for every platform but R. They say there will be community support because there is no market for it. Even companies that have an R API do not update it as much as their other APIs. They tend to only update the tools that are for their target area, not realizing that there is a market for people who work in R. It wouldn’t even be that hard since R was written in C, so all you would have to do is modify an existing C API.

 

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

New York City’s R Community’s Diverse Population Provides a Depth of Speakers

By Blog, Events

R Consortium talked with Jared Lander about the R Community in the New York Metro area. The R Community’s ability to draw upon not only their large metro area as well as their status as a hub city has allowed them to have many different speakers. This has allowed them to grow the community to an impressive size.

RC: What is the R community like in New York?

We are not just the City, but we have a broad reach. We have an active and vibrant community that is very enthusiastic. From Brooklyn Hipster data scientists with MacBooks riding a fixie [Editor’s note: A type of bicycle with just one gear, considered cool and stylish], office workers in slacks and ties just off from work, and everything in between. 

Old school data scientists who consider themselves hardcore statisticians, people just learning the field, people with 30 years of experience, people with one-year experience dipping toes into a different field, we have so many people, the topic of the meeting determines who shows up. If we have a finance talk we will give finance and insurance. Marketing topics will give marketing and business people. If we have a pharmaceutical talk we will get biologists and biostatisticians. 

We also have talks on topics like racing, military, doctors, and lawyers. We have talks and members from all walks of life. We have over 12,200 members. We usually have a core group that shows up to meetings, but others will come because a topic speaks to them. Some won’t come for 6 months till another topic interests them. Attendance comes down to the meeting.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

We lose the in-person connection. We usually have people show up at 6:15-6:30pm for pizza and (budget allowing) drinks. Usually, people meet for 30 or 40 minutes and talk/socialize and start making friends. We have a speaker go on for 45 minutes or so. We then went to the bar to hang out about whether or not they drink. We get a great lecture, the best night school, that’s free, sandwiched between hanging out with people who are interested in your field or something close to your field. 

Even though we are missing out on that, we are meeting every month. We are having Zoom fatigue because we are losing people. So we do clearly lose out on that social interaction. In-person meetings can have several people having a chat, while a Zoom meeting can only have, at most, two people talking at a time. It becomes a one-way lens. 

People will chat in a Slack room where people can ask their questions. However, I preferred the in-person where people could nod to show understanding or sit next to people and whisper to them. We are missing out on that. 

We were interested in using gather.town and spatial.chat, but were unable to. Due to meetup.com restrictions, we are forced to use Zoom. 

However, the nice thing about going virtual is that we got a worldwide attendance from those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. 

Going forward, we will have the in-person meetup (hopefully soon) and Zoom as well. This way, people can participate online and via Slack as well as in person. People can also access all of our meetings via our website or our YouTube channel.

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? 

Will Landau wrote the drake package and the targets package. Targets is a real game changer at my work. It makes my life so much easier as it looks at dependencies to not rerun redundant processes and parallel processes tasks. I was able to get Will to give a speech after he attended another meetup. I have done that several times actually, where people who wrote packages attended, and I have been able to get them to do future meetups.

RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?

It’s getting more respect. People are starting to learn that R is a full production language, and I have used it in many sectors. We are getting more people who are learning it for a job, and they come and visit us, and they learn that there is more to it.

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?

We have a lot of members who are journalists who either use data to figure out what’s going on and/or use data to inform their readers. We have members from AP Press, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and more. It’s so cool seeing this because they want to use data to find out what’s going on. They love it, and it’s so great to see these people who are using the code to find the outcome.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

Our next meetup is on June 15 is a talk by Emil Hvitfeldt who is going to talk about text mining. The July 13 is by Sean Taylor with no topic chosen yet.

RC: Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium,  do you have a favorite project?  Why is it your favorite?

SFDBI because I do a lot of geospatial work. I have always asked people if I can work with geospatial data in postGIS, I can use geospatial data in R, can I use postGIS in R and I’m hoping that I can do it in R now.

RC: Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite?  Why is it your favorite?

Distributing computing. Most things don’t need it, but we had a speaker who worked on Ballista (now merged with Arrow Datafusion) which is a language-agnostic distributive computing program that could be integrated into R. This could force people like NVidea to port CUFD to R.

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!

Bioconductor Asia Membership Increasing Due to Going Virtual

By Blog, Events

R Consortium talked to Bioconductor Asia co-organizer Matt Ritchie about the upcoming conference (BioC Asia 2021), how COVID has affected attendance at the conference, and how they deal with multilingualism at their meetings.

RC: What is the R community like for Bioconductor Asia?

In terms of other Bioconductor groups, such as Europe and America, Bioconductor Asia is quite small. We are building up, and are grateful to receive R Consortium support for our event. The first BioC Asia was held in 2015 as a satellite of the GIW/InCoB meeting in Japan. The program included a workshop day, followed by a mini-conference where people could learn about Bioconductor and present their research. Martin Morgan (project lead at the time) gave a talk and an introductory workshop on Bioconductor to around 30 participants. In the following years, we organized our meetings as satellite events to the larger ABACBS annual conference in Australia (Brisbane 2016, Adelaide 2017, Melbourne 2018 and Sydney 2019). In 2020, we were planning an in-person meeting in China hosted by Tsinghua University and were expecting a large audience of around 200 attendees. Oddly, after we went digital we ended up having 400 registrants. Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, BioC Asia 2020 offered free registration and more people could participate in the workshops than ever before. In 2021, we will again run our event virtually, with lead organizer Kozo Nishida from RIKEN in Japan. We are also keen to have conferences in other countries. Last year we had several people from South Korea attend, so maybe future BioC Asia events can be hosted virtually (or in person) by South Korean researchers.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

We canceled the in-person conference and went virtual. Zoom was the main tool that we use to communicate, and we set up a #biocasia2020 channel on the Bioconductor community slack for further discussion. Because of the virtual conference we were able to increase attendees in the workshops, where we had more people possible for virtual than in person (100 plus people online versus 30 or so for in person workshops, often limited due to physical restrictions of space). For the conference, we used the Orchestra platform that Sean Davis developed for running workshops in the cloud. We recently used this platform to run virtual training in Africa, so it’s been well tested now in different parts of the world and can scale up or down very easily. We are likely to keep a hybrid option in the future as it is more accessible for students and people without a travel budget. We want our meetings to be as accessible as possible. It’s also nice to have a meeting in your general time zone as opposed to one that is scheduled for when you were hoping to be asleep, which is often the case for meetings based around other time zones. 

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? 

I enjoyed the presentation by Koki Tsuyuzaki on tensor decomposition and the work that has gone into applying this approach to single-cell data analysis in the scTensor package (a video of this presentation is available from the Bioconductor YouTube channel). F1000Research, who also sponsored our meeting, hosted the slides from this presentation which were accessible before and after the talk so people could easily follow along at home. F1000Research also allows hosting of poster presentations, which is great for virtual poster sessions.

RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?

The growing influence that the tidyverse is having on the Bioconductor project, with software such as tidyBulk and plyranges applying these principles to genomic data analysis. Both packages have been developed by researchers based in our region, and it will be exciting to see further applications in the future.

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?

Although not directly related to Bioconductor, the work led by Rafael Irizarry that I saw presented at an AMSI Bioinfosummer public lecture in 2019 on estimating the number of excess deaths in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (bioRxiv preprint here and news story here) is very inspiring. They modeled data to look at excess deaths and found that the government reported figures grossly underestimated the real impact of the disaster, which lasted long after the Hurricane had ended.

RC: When is your next event? Please give details!

BioC Asia 2021 will be held Nov 1-4 as a virtual event. The lead organizer is Kozo Nishida from RIKEN, who represents our region on the Bioconductor Community Advisory Board. This is the second time the event is hosted in Japan, albeit virtually this time around.

RC: Of the Funded Projects by the R Consortium,  do you have a favorite project?  Why is it your favorite?

An early one funded in the 2016 round: ‘Software Carpentry R Instructor Training’ by Dr Laurent Gatto was a really valuable contribution for teaching countless people how to use R. Software carpentry is an amazing platform for onboarding new users, and Laurent and colleagues are currently planning a new curriculum that introduces the world of Bioconductor using this approach.

RC: Of the Active Working Groups, which is your favorite?  Why is it your favorite?

R / Medicine, as a lot of Bioconductor tools are used in clinical research and there is a lot of interest in Bioconductor from that sector. R / Medicine has an annual conference that will be held virtually this year on August 24-27th.

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?

More support for teaching R in other Languages would be great for our work. At BioC Asia 2020 we ran workshops in Mandarin which proved very popular. We have also published RNA-seq analysis workflows in English and Chinese. It would be great to see more multilingual vignettes and workflows so that people can learn about different packages in whatever language suits them best. We are looking at redeveloping the Bioconductor website and aim to have key landing pages and training material translated into different languages. Adding closed captioning in English to talks can also improve accessibility.

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-Ladies Philly – Building our Online Community During the Pandemic

By Blog, Events

Authored by: the R-Ladies Philly organizing team

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, R-Ladies Philly has shifted from local in-person meetups to virtual events. Hundreds of local, national, and even international R enthusiasts joined us for monthly virtual meetups and social activities! We organized more than 10 R workshops and co-hosted a datathon with local partners. We even launched a YouTube channel to make our workshop recordings widely available. Based on feedback from our members, this has been very successful despite the difficulties associated with COVID-19. In this post, we share a bit more information on our events and what has worked for our group.

Workshops

Starting from April 2020, we organized 11 R workshops, ranging from basic data cleaning and visualization to more advanced R usage like R package development and popular topics such as machine learning. One of our goals is to celebrate gender diversity in the R community by highlighting different speakers. We also aim to engage R users from all different levels and encourage speakers to share their learning experiences. We made all workshop content and notes captured during Q&A available to the public through our Youtube channel and event recaps on the R-Ladies Philly blog. See below for links to our workshop events:

  1. Tidyverse (April 2020) – Kelsey Keith
  2. A/B Testing in R (May 2020) – Elea McDonnell Feit
  3. Introduction to R lightning talks (June 2020)
    • 6 R Packages to Add to Your Workflow – Jinyi Kuang
    • How to install R and RStudio for the first time – Tess Cherlin
  4. How to Test and Roll (July 2020) – Elea McDonnell Feit and Ron Berman
  5. Hands on Machine Learning (August 2020) – Jaclyn Taroni
  6. Decision Trees & Random Forests (September 2020) – Trang Le and Karla Fettich
  7. Flexdashboard and debugging with shinyobjects (October 2020) – Jake Riley
  8. Your first R package in 1 hour (November 2020) – Shannon Pileggi
  9. Data Visualization (December 2020) – Trang Le
  10. Introduction to R dashboard development with Shiny Dashboard (January 2021) – Anastasia Lucas
  11. From Learn-R to Teach-R (February 2021) – Ama Nyame-Mensah, Cass Wilkinson Saldaña and Silvia Canelón
A screenshot from our panel event that is posted on YouTube. Here we used slido.com to facilitate a panel session with R educators. The top upvoted questions are: “How can I teach my coworkers R?”, “Learning what to google when something went wrong was such a big factor in my own learning curve. Any advice for helping beginners learn what to search?” and “How do you come up with good active learning opportunities, or examples?”

Datathons

We asked Datathon 2021 participants how they would describe the experience in one word or phrase. This word cloud visualizes their responses. Teamwork, learning, and cats feature prominently.

Every year, R-Ladies Philly organizes a datathon that aims to bring R enthusiasts and community organizations together to create insights through data and give participants exposure to new techniques, real-world data, and a diverse group of local data science professionals. These datathons consist of in-person kickoff and conclusion events, and 6 weeks of online collaboration in between. 

The pandemic caught us in the middle of our 2020 datathon, which was a collaborative effort with other local data groups to help address the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia, so the conclusion meetup had to change format from in-person to online (see a recording here). 

In 2021, we had to switch to a fully online format, where the kickoff meetup was held via Zoom and participants organized themselves into groups through breakout rooms. Our 2021 datathon explored judicial patterns in Philadelphia courts, including bail, sentencing, and the concept of ‘judge harshness’. Participants worked together using Zoom, Slack, GitHub, and a shared Google doc for Q&A that also allowed the partner organization to answer questions asynchronously. Our conclusion meetup (view the recording here) showcases some of the highlights of this year’s datathon findings and the work that participants have put into analyzing a large and complex real-world dataset. 

Insights from a virtual year

Overall, we are looking forward to returning to our pre-pandemic format when it is safe to do so. Being forced to adapt our approach has had some benefits. We were able to reach a broader audience that was not previously able to travel to our events. We were also able to try new event formats and new technology. For example, we held two virtual social events where we experimented with different formats to get to know each other remotely. We also used tools like breakout rooms in zoom for our datathon and online tools like sli.do for polls and Q&A sessions for our panel and datathon events. We also tried to keep our events as interactive as possible with lively chats and the usage of Google docs to track and answer all participant questions during workshop events. These practices will be useful for all future workshops, whether virtual, in-person, or hybrid.

We are looking forward to continuing to build our online presence with more YouTube and blog posts, even when we are able to meet again face to face. If you are interested in joining us, please look for upcoming events on our meetup page. We are also seeking volunteers to plan and lead hands-on workshops for the remainder of 2021. Please learn more by visiting our website.

Some photos of our in-person meetups before the pandemic. We look forward to eating pizza together again one day.

Find out about the R Community in Zurich, Switzerland

By Blog, Events

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. The wealth of knowledge in the community and the drive to learn and improve is inspiring. We had a chance to talk with Muriel Buri, Statistical Scientist and organizer of Zurich R User Meetup, to find out more about the R community in Zurich, how they’re holding up during the pandemic, trends in R, and what the future holds. 

If you are interested in applying to the RUGS program for your organization, see the How do I Join? section at the end of this article.

RC: What is the R Community like in Zurich?

We started with the RUG in 2015 and by now we have just 2000 members. However, looking at Switzerland, there are smaller communities based in Lucerne and Bern and there is one R-Ladies group in Lausanne, which’s the French part of Switzerland. They all are a bit smaller, however, it’s a nice exchange between the groups and as you might be aware, the Zurich team is very much involved in organizing the Global User R Conference.

Zooming back in on the R community in Zurich, it’s a very diverse community. As mentioned, the Zurich RUG was founded in December 2015 and has been growing substantially since. The frequently organized Meetup events regularly gather a crowd of over 100 people and foster a very lively and intensive exchange among the R community in the Zurich region. The diversity regarding the applications of R, as well as the different occupations of the useRs in the community, such as data journalism, academic research, different insurances, official statistics, foundations, etc. are unique and outstanding characteristics of the Zurich R community.

The diversity is also what I enjoy the most at all these meetings. Not just having an exchange between the group you usually interact with, but having a broader exchange with different people, professions, levels of useRs, application fields, etc. To summarize, the community is very inclusive, and there is no such thing like a stupid question.

RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?

The Zurich RUG has shifted its focus a bit as many of the RUG members are now actively involved in the virtual global useR! 2021 conference. This has already started when we originally applied for the (planned) in-person useR! 2021 which has by now became the global virtual useR! 2021 conference. Hence, for me, it is challenging to distinguish between how COVID has affected us and how our engagement in the organisation of the useR! 2021 has affected our local activities.

At the start of the pandemic, we did not organise anything. After two or three months into the ‘lockdown’ (which in Switzerland was quite soft in comparison to other countries), the small group of the RUG Zurich organizers met in a park for lunch. At that time, I do recall that we all were a bit Zoom-fatigued. We then waited for a while and organised our first virtual event in October 2020. It was nice and many people attended it. However, what we always enjoyed best was having the beer part afterwards. Having this all virtual just wasn’t the same. It is very difficult to get that socializing part going in a virtual space.

Luckily, the Swiss R community is still active thanks to the Lucerne useR! group (@lucerne_r) which have actually started during the pandemic. They nicely promote their online events on Twitter, and we’d always retweet these tweets for our own community. It is nice to see that the community isn’t asleep.

RC: Can virtual technologies be used to make us more inclusive?

I personally do believe that virtual technologies do have the power to make us more inclusive, yes. As an example, the useR! 2021 conference will be the first R conference that is global by design, both in audience and leadership. Leveraging a diversity of experiences and backgrounds helps us to make the conference accessible and inclusive in as many ways as possible and to grow the global community of R users giving new talents access to this amazing ecosystem. New technologies make the conference more accessible to minoritized individuals and we strive to leverage that potential. Additionally, we pay special attention to the needs of people with a disability to ensure that they can attend and contribute to the conference as conveniently as possible. 

That being said, we will surely do our best to use these innovations also later within our own Zurich based 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? 

There is no specific presentation that I would like to highlight. To me it seems our audience always appreciates events with learning tutorials very much.


For example, we once had a presentation on Docker for R users. Another time, we were able to encourage Martin Mächler to give a talk. That was also really great. His presentation was entitled “What I find important in R programming and recent cool features in R.”

The way we often organize our meetups is that we will have one specific topic and two speakers presenting. As mentioned, the R community in Zurich is very heterogeneous so that we would for example have a financial theme for one meetup and would then look for a bank to sponsor and/or host our event. Or we’d have an insurance related topic and try to organise this event at an insurance company.

RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?

In the age of this pandemic, virtual meetups have become an indispensable tool for the community. Based on this, I was wondering if the local R community groups will still be as important as they used to be. It seems to me that the community is moving closer globally and even more (virtual) exchange is happening. 

The question of predicting a specific trend in R language affecting our organization over the next year is challenging. From my personal perspective, as I now work in the pharma industry, I see a big trend moving away from SAS towards R. With this, the promotion of friendly end-user Shiny Apps to present and discuss data analyses to people who are less familiar with the concepts is a big trend too.

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?

Yes, indeed, there are at least two members at Zurich RUG, Timo Grossenbacher (@grssnbchr) and Marie-José Kolly (@mjKolly). They have both presented their work at our meetups and the community has been very interested in their talks.

Marie-José writes data journalism articles for the Republik magazine in Zurich. One of her articles is about the protection of unborn life and the woman’s right to self-determination. The article allows for a visual journey through the weeks of pregnancy. The article is also nominated for the Swiss Press Award and can be accessed here (paywall, in German).

RC: Of the funded projects on R Consortium, what is your favorite project and why?

To be honest, I wasn’t aware that there are so many different funded projects on R Consortium. What a great effort!

The satRday conferences are events that I enjoy very much. The support of the R-Ladies groups is surely also a project that I personally like a lot.

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?

That is a challenging question. I worked myself in Uganda and taught statistics to veterinary medical doctors. R as an open-source program for statistical computing is fantastic as everyone with internet access can make use of it. I think I would personally promote more such projects to promote the growth of the global community of R users by advancing its accessible and inclusiveness. I’d initiate a project that promotes the global use of R. This vision is motivated by my experience of seeking sponsors for the global useR! 2021 conference. We did experience some challenges to gain access to all global communities, e.g. R is used in so many parts of the world but not everyone yet might be aware of the great resources, the worldwide community and the global exchange… Yes, I would suggest a project that pursues this vision.

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 2021 RUGS Program is Live!

By Announcement, Blog
source: R User Groups on meetup.com – 35 countries • 85 groups • 65,200+ members

The R Consortium is excited to announce the 2021 R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS). We give grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other.  We are now accepting applications!

Find out details and apply now: R User Groups Support Program (RUGS)

Because of the limitations of the COVID-19 pandemic on face-to-face meetings, the RUGS program has accordingly shifted its application criteria. The changes are intended to continue to support the energy and creativity of R groups around the globe but focus on virtual and remote solutions.

Changes to the 2021 RUGS program are as follows: 

  • Free access to R Consortium Meetup Pro account
    • Manage and build events/meetings 
    • Analytics on events and networks 
    • Organize communications with your team
  • Tiers of grants no longer specified. Draft a proposal including your requested grant amount and purpose

The RUGS 2021 User Group Grants program will award grants in two parts. First, R user groups not affiliated with the RUGS meetup.com Pro will be enrolled with dues covered by the R Consortium for twelve months. Groups will be eligible for a cash award of up to $500. 

The RUGS Small Conference Support program will award grants of up to $1,000 to conferences arranged by non-profit or volunteer organizations. 

In order to participate in the R Consortium RUGS program (generally smaller organizations), user groups must meet the following criteria:

  • Have R as a primary focus 
  • Adhere to R Consortium Code of Conduct 
  • Use RUGS meetup.com Pro program to announce and track meetings
  • One blog post per year 
  • Completed W9 Form (US applicants) or Wire Transfer form (non-US)

To participate in the small conference support program (generally slightly larger organizations), conference organizers must agree to the following criteria: 

  • Have R as a primary focus
  • Adhere to R Consortium Code of Conduct
  • Publish a code of conduct on conference website, including violation or help report option
  • Acknowledge R Consortium as a sponsor, showcasing R Consortium logo on event site
  • Post event blog post with summary of key metrics for possible publication on R Consortium blog.
  • Offer R Consortium same benefits that other sponsors at the same level of support are offered.

For more information and/or to apply, please visit the R User Groups Support Program (RUGS) page on our website.

There’s still time! The 2021 RUGS program began accepting applications on January 28, 2021, and will continue to take applications through September 30, 2021. 

R Consortium Community Grants and Sponsorships Top USD $1,000,000

By Announcement

Fall Grant Application Cycle Starts September 2019

SAN FRANCISCO, August 28, 2019 – The R Consortium, a Linux Foundation project supporting the R Foundation and R community, today announced a major milestone of $1,000,000 in grants and sponsorships approved. This includes both grants for R projects like R-hub, R-Ladies, RC RUGS, and many more, and community event sponsorships, like financial support for useR! 2019, R Cascadia, R/Medicine, and other R events large and small worldwide. The nonprofit organization also announced that they will begin accepting Fall Grant Cycle proposals starting September 2019.

Grants are awarded in areas of software development, developing new teaching materials, documenting best practices, standardising APIs or other areas of research that “broadly help the R community.” Full details for submitting a proposal, deadlines, and a list of previously funded projects is available at: https://www.r-consortium.org/projects/call-for-proposals

“The goal of the R Consortium is to strengthen the R community by improving infrastructure and building for long term stability,” said Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chair, R Consortium. “The grants help support important projects that impact many R users through better software and stronger communities. We are so grateful for the immense work that the R community does and so happy that we can contribute back.”

Example sponsorship and grant recipients include:

  • R-hub, a centralised tool for checking R packages;
  • R-Ladies, a world-wide organization whose mission is to promote diversity in the R community;
  • RC RUGS, the R Consortium’s R user group and small conference support program;
  • SatRDays, bootstrapping a system for local R conferences;
  • Testing DBI and improving key open source database backends.

A complete list of projects that previously received grants is available at https://www.r-consortium.org/projects/awarded-projects

“In the R-hub project we created and operate a multi-platform build and check service for R packages, free to use for everyone in the R community, thanks to the support of the R Consortium,” said Gábor Csárdi, software engineer at RStudio, and author and maintainer of R-hub. “As of today R-hub supports 20 platforms on four operating systems (macOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris), and since its start it has handled 68,000 submissions, for more than 3,000 different R packages, from more than 2,000 package maintainers. It has become a key tool for R developers around the world.”

“Thanks to R Consortium for their support in helping R-Ladies grow to 167 groups in 47 countries with close to 50,000 members,” said Gabriela de Queiroz, Senior Engineering and Data Science Manager at IBM and Founder of R-Ladies. “With their support, we’re able to help people who identify as underrepresented minority achieve their programming potential through our network of R leaders, mentors, and learners.”

“RC RUGS is able to focus on supporting user groups and smaller conferences around the world, filling a real need to support grass-roots organizations that are not in large cities or other well-known locations. There are great R communities around the world in many different locations. This year we are delighted to see user groups applying from Latin America, Africa, South Asia and other underserved regions throughout the world,” said Joseph Rickert, R Consortium Director and administrator of the program. “We are trying very hard to connect R users with limited resources into the greater R Community”. 

The 2019 Fall grant cycle open September 2019. More information on submitting a proposal for a grant is available at: https://www.r-consortium.org/projects/call-for-proposals

About The R Consortium 

The R Consortium is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization and Linux Foundation project dedicated to the support and growth of the R user community. The R Consortium provides support to the R Foundation and to the greater R Community for projects that assist R package developers, provide documentation and training, facilitate the growth of the R Community and promote the use of the R language. For more information about R Consortium, please visit: http://www.r-consortium.org.