Conference Report: useR! 2011

The ‘Conference Report: useR! 2011’ article from the 2011-2 issue.

The seventh international R user conference, useR! 2011, took place at the University of Warwick, Coventry, 16–18 August 2011.

Following previous useR! conferences, this meeting of the R user community aimed to provide a platform for R users to discuss and exchange ideas of how R can be used for statistical computation, data analysis and visualization.

The conference attracted close to 450 participants, from 36 countries across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia. The technical program comprised 136 regular talks, 30 lightning talks, two panel sessions, 21 regular posters and another 16 late-breaking posters, as well as eight invited talks. The social program consisted of an opening mixer, a poster reception sponsored by Revolution Analytics and a conference dinner sponsored by RStudio.

1 Pre-conference Tutorials

Prior to the conference, sixteen half-day tutorials were hrld. As in previous years, these tutorials were extremely popular, with 167 participants attending one or more of the following courses:

• Douglas Bates: Fitting and evaluating mixed models using lme4.

• Roger Bivand and Edzer Pebesma: Handling and analyzing spatio-temporal data in R.

• Marine Cadoret and Sébastien Lê: Analysing categorical data in R.

• Stephen Eglen: Emacs Speaks Statistics.

• Andrea Foulkes: High-dimensional data methods with R.

• Frank E Harrell Jr: Regression modeling strategies using the R package rms.

• Søren Højsgaard: Graphical models and Bayesian networks with R.

• G. Jay Kerns: Introductory probability and statistics using R.

• Max Kuhn: Predictive modeling with R and the caret package.

• Fausto Molinari, Enrico Branca, Francesco De Filippo and Rocco Claudio Cannizzaro: R-Adamant: Applied financial analysis & risk management.

• Martin Morgan: Bioconductor for the analysis of high-throughput genomic data.

• Paul Murrell: Introduction to grid graphics.

• Giovanni Petris: State space models in R.

• Karline Soetaert and Thomas Petzoldt: Simulating differential equation models in R.

• Antony Unwin: Graphical data analysis.

• Brandon Whitcher, Polzehl, Karsten Tabelow: Medical image analysis for MRI.

2 Invited Talks

The invited talks provided a focus point for the conference, where the participants gathered to hear from distinguished R users/developers. The logistical constraint of having to divide into two rooms, one with the speaker and one with a video link, seemed to pose little inconvenience to participants and overall there was a positive response to the following talks:

• Adrian Bowman: Modelling Three-dimensional Surfaces in R.

• Lee Edlefsen: High Performance Computing in R.

• Ulrike : Design of Experiments in R.

• Wolfgang Huber: From Genomes to Phenotypes.

• Brian Ripley: The R Development Process.

• Jonathan Rougier: Nomograms for visualising relationships between three variables.

• Simon Urbanek: R Graphics: Supercharged - Recent Advances in Visualization and Analysis of Large Data in R.

• Brandon Whitcher: Quantitative Analysis of Medical Imaging Data in

3 User-contributed Sessions

The themes of this year’s Focus sessions were as follows:

• Computational Physics and Chemometrics

• Data Management

• Data Mining

• Development of R

• Dimensionality Reduction and Variable Selection

• Ecology and Ecological Modelling

• Finance

• Genomics and Bioinformatics

• High Performance Computing

• Hydrology and Soil Science

• Inference

• Interfaces

• Modelling Systems and Networks

• Multivariate Data

• Neuroscience

• Official and Social Statistics

• Population Genetics

• Process Optimization

• Programming

• Psychometrics

• Statistical Modelling

• Reporting Technologies and Workflows

• R in the Business World

• Spatio-Temporal Statistics

• Teaching

• Visualisation and Graphics

These themes were also represented in the poster session and in the seven kaleidoscope sessions that presented talks particularly suitable for a wider audience.

A new feature of the useR! 2011 conference was the opportunity for participants to give a Lightning Talk, a 5-minute presentation on any R-related topic aimed particularly at those new to R. This resulted in three highly enjoyable sessions on the themes:

Community and Communication

Statistics and Programming

Package Showcase

Participants seemed to appreciate this fast-paced introduction to a wide range of topics and it provided lots of scope for discussion as we moved on to dinner and the evening poster reception.

4 Organisers

Many thanks go to this year’s program committee:

Ramón Díaz-Uriarte, John Fox, Romain François, Robert Gramacy, Paul Hewson, Torsten Hothorn, Kate Mullen, Brian Peterson, Thomas Petzoldt, Anthony Rossini, Barry Rowlingson, Carolin Strobl, Stefan Theussl, Heather Turner, Hadley Wickham and Achim Zeileis.

and also the local organisers:

John Aston, Julia Brettschneider, David Firth, Ashley Ford, Ioannis Kosmidis, Tom Nichols, Elke and Heather Turner.

5 Further Information

The useR! 2011 website, http://www.R-project.org/useR-2011/ provides a record of the conference. Where authors have made them available, slides are accessible via the online conference schedule. In addition videos of several of the invited talks have been put on the R-bloggers website: http://www.r-bloggers.com/RUG/category/user-conference/.

CRAN packages used

lme4, rms, caret

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Econometrics, Environmetrics, HighPerformanceComputing, MachineLearning, MixedModels, Psychometrics, ReproducibleResearch, SpatioTemporal, Survival

Note

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