A summary of the useR! 2010 conference.
The R user conference, useR! 2010, took place on the Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) July 21-23 2010. Following the five previous useR! conferences (held in Austria, Germany, Iowa, and France), useR! 2010 focused on
R as the ‘lingua franca’ of data analysis and statistical computing,
providing a venue to discuss and exchange ideas on the use of R for statistical computations, data analysis, visualization, and exciting applications in various fields and
providing an overview of the new features of the rapidly evolving R project.
The conference drew over 450 R users hailing from 29 countries. The technical program was composed of 167 contributed presentations, seven invited lectures, a poster session, and a panel discussion on ‘Challenges of Bringing R into Commercial Environments’. The social program of the conference included several receptions and a dinner at the National Zoo.
Organization of the conference was thanks to individuals participating in the following committees:
Louis Bajuk-Yorgan, Dirk Eddelbuettel, John Fox, Virgilio Gómez-Rubio, Richard Heiberger, Torsten Hothorn, Aaron King, Jan de Leeuw, Nicholas Lewin-Koh, Andy Liaw, Uwe Ligges, Martin Mächler, Katharine Mullen, Heather Turner, Ravi Varadhan, H. D. Vinod, John Verzani, Alan Zaslavsky, Achim Zeileis
Kevin Coakley, Nathan Dodder, David Gil, William Guthrie, Olivia Lau, Walter Liggett, John Lu, Katharine Mullen, Jonathon Phillips, Antonio Possolo, Daniel Samarov, Ravi Varadhan
Torsten Hothorn, Achim Zeileis
The diversity of interests in the R community was reflected in the themes of the user-contributed sessions. The themes were:
Bioinformatics workflows
Biostatistics (three sessions)
Biostatistics workflows
Business intelligence
Cloud computing
Commercial applications (two sessions)
Computer experiments and simulation
Data manipulation and classification
Data mining, machine learning
Finance and resource allocation
fMRI
Fene expressions, genetics
Grid computing
Graphical User Interfaces (two sessions)
High-performance-computing
Interfaces
Lists and objects
Longitudinal data analysis
MetRology
Optimization
Parallel computing
Pedagogy (three sessions)
Real-time computing
Reproducible research and generating reports
R social networks
RuG panel discussion
Social sciences
Spatio-temporal data analysis
Spreadsheets and RExcel
Time series
Visualization
In addition to sessions on these themes, research was presented in a poster session and in Kaleidescope sessions aimed at a broad audience.
The day before the official start of the conference, on July 20, the following nineteen 3-hour tutorials were given by R experts:
Douglas Bates: Fitting and evaluating mixed models using lme4
Peter Danenberg and Manuel Eugster: Literate programming with Roxygen
Karin Groothuis-Oudshoorn and Stef van Buuren: Handling missing data in R with MICE
Frank Harrell Jr: Statistical presentation graphics
François Husson and Julie Josse: Exploratory data analysis with a special focus on clustering and multiway methods
Uwe Ligges: My first R package
Daniel Samarov, Errol Strain and Elaine McVey: R for Eclipse
Jing Hua Zhao: Genetic analysis of complex traits
Alex Zolot: Work with R on Amazon’s Cloud
Karim Chine: Elastic-R, a google docs-like portal for data analysis in the cloud
Dirk Eddelbuettel: Introduction to high-performance computing with R
Michael Fay: Interval censored data analysis
Virgilio Gómez-Rubio: Applied spatial data analysis with R
Frank Harrell Jr: Regression modeling strategies using the R package rms
Olivia Lau: A crash course in R programming
Friedrich Leisch: Sweave - Writing dynamic and reproducible documents
John Nash: Optimization and related nonlinear modelling computations in R
Brandon Whitcher, Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux, Bradley Buchsbaum and Polzehl: Medical image analysis for structural and functional MRI
The distinguished invited lecturers were:
Mark S. Handcock: Statistical Modeling of Networks in R
Frank E. Harrell Jr: Information Allergy
Friedrich Leisch: Reproducible Statistical Research in Practice
Uwe Ligges: Prospects and Challenges for CRAN - with a glance on 64-bit Windows binaries
Richard M. Stallman: Free Software in Ethics and in Practice
Luke Tierney: Some possible directions for the R engine
Diethelm Würtz: The Hull, the Feasible Set, and the Risk Surface: A Review of the Portfolio Modeling Infrastructure in R/Rmetrics
In addition, Antonio Possolo (Chief of the Statistical Engineering Division at NIST) began the conference with a rousing speech to welcome participants.
The conference webpage http://www.R-project.org/useR-2010 makes available abstracts and slides associated with presentations, as well as links to video of plenary sessions. Questions regarding the conference may be addressed to useR-2010@R-project.org.
Many thanks to all those who contributed to useR! 2010. The talks, posters, ideas, and spirit of cooperation that R users from around the world brought to Gaithersburg made the conference a great success.
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Mullen, "useR! 2010", The R Journal, 2010
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2010-2-user,
author = {Mullen, Katharine},
title = {useR! 2010},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2010},
note = {https://rjournal.github.io/},
volume = {2},
issue = {2},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {77-78}
}