Conference Report: European R Users Meeting 2016

The ‘Conference Report: European R Users Meeting 2016’ article from the 2017-1 issue.

1 Introduction

The European R Users Meeting (eRum) 2016 was an international conference aimed at integrating users of the R language. eRum 2016 was held between October 12 and 14, 2016, in Poznań, Poland at Poznań University of Economics and Business (http://erum.ue.poznan.pl/).

The main purpose of eRum was to integrate R users from Europe and provide a platform for sharing experiences between academics and practitioners. We wanted to give the participants the possibility to present various applications of R, get to know different R packages and get involved in a broader collaboration. In addition, we wanted to create an opportunity for R users who were not able to participate in UseR 2016 that was held in Stanford, CA, USA.

The conference was organized by the Students Scientific Association ‘Estymator’, the Department of Statistics of Poznań University of Economics and Business and the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Methods of Poznań University of Life Sciences. The supporting organizers were two local groups of R enthusiasts - PAZUR - Poznań R Users Group and SER - Warsaw R Users Group. eRum hosted 82 speakers from over 20 countries. Over 250 participants took part in 12 parallel sessions devoted to methodology, business, R packages, data workflow, bioR, lightning talks, and education learning. Beside the parallel sessions the conference featured 10 invited talks.

We are looking forward to the next European R Users Meeting in 2018 and we encourage anyone interested in organizing an eRum event in their country to get in touch with us.

2 The Organizing Committee

To ensure the Organizing Committee was as diverse as possible, its chair, Maciej Beręsewicz from Poznań University of Economics and Business and Statistical Office in Poznań had invited people from different fields of science and business:

• Adolfo Alvarez, Analyx,

• Przemysław Biecek, MIM University of Warsaw, MiNI Warsaw University of Technology,

• Marcin Dyderski, Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznań University of Life Sciences,

• Marcin Kosiński, Warsaw R Enthusiasts,

• Jakub Nowosad, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, University of Cincinnati,

• Kamil Rotter, Poznań University of Economics and Business,

• Alicja Szabelska-Beręsewicz, Poznań University of Life Sciences,

• Marcin Szymkowiak, Poznań University of Economics and Business,

• Łukasz Wawrowski, Poznań University of Economics and Business,

• Joanna Zyprych-Walczak, Poznań University of Life Sciences.

3 Pre-conference workshops

Ten workshops were held at Poznań University of Life Sciences and in the Statistical Office in Poznań during the first day of eRum 2016 (October 12th 2016). They were divided into two sessions.
Morning session:

• An introduction to R (in Polish) held by Adam Dąbrowski

• Predictive modeling with R held by Artur Suchwałko

• Data Visualization using R held by Matthias Templ

• Time series forecasting with R held by Adam Zagdański

• R for expression profiling by Next Generation Sequencing held by Paweł Łabaj

Afternoon session:

• Introduction to Bayesian Statistics with R and Stan held by Rasmus Bååth

• Small Area Estimation with R held by Virgilio Gómez-Rubio

• R for industry and business: Statistical tools for quality control and improvement held by Emilio L. Cano

• An introduction to changepoint models using R held by Rebecca Killick

• Visualising spatial data with R: from ‘base’ to ‘shiny’ held by Robin Lovelace

Altogether the workshops were attended by 150 people. The workshops dedicated to Bayesian Statistics with R and Stan and Predictive modeling with R turned out to be the most popular ones - each attracted as many as 40 attendees.

4 Invited speakers

There were five plenary sessions, each featuring two invited speakers. The speaker roster was balanced in terms of nationality (5 from Poland, 5 from abroad), gender (6 males, 4 females), institution (7 from academia, 3 from business) and topic (5 methodology, 5 tools or misc).

We were honored to host the following invited speakers: Rasmus Bååth (Lund University), Przemysław Biecek (University of Warsaw), Romain Francois (Consulting Datactive), Marek Gagolewski (Polish Academy of Sciences), Jakub Glinka (GfK Data Lab), Ulrike (Beuth University of Applied Sciences), Katarzyna Kopczewska (University of Warsaw), Katarzyna Stapor (Silesian University of Technology), Matthias Templ (Vienna University of Technology), Heather Turner (University of Warwick).

All invited talks were recorded and are available as a youtube playlist at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCsJUtCRSFbejqCqAURNVOFFpoDCMeuO5. The book of abstracts, presentations from all sessions, posters and other documents associated with eRum 2016 are available at https://github.com/eRum2016/.

5 Trivia

The conference speakers cited 179 R packages. The most popular included: ggplot2, shiny, dplyr, caret, leaflet, sp, cluster, e1071, knitr, magrittr, randomForest, Rcpp, rgdal, rgeos, rmarkdown, rstan, SparkR.

Thanks to our platinum sponsor McKinsey it was possible to organize a social event which included a conference dinner at Poznań’s Municipal Stadium together with a tour of the Stadium.

Group photos taken on the first day of the conference can be found here https://www.goo.gl/X0QfZ5.

After the conference some of the participants took part in a sightseeing tour of Poznań, which was organized on 15th of October.

6 Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Faculty of Informatics and Electronic Economy Poznan University of Economics and Business and our sponsors (McKinsey, Microsoft, eoda, Analyx, tidk, DataCamp, WLOG solutions, Quantide and Rstudio) for their financial support, which was used to organize daily lunches, coffee breaks and a social program featuring a conference dinner at the Municipal Stadium in Poznań.

Special thanks to Klaudia Korniluk for her outstanding work on the logo of eRum 2016 and coming up with the idea of "R heros". We also thank R-Bloggers and SmartedPoland for their support in spreading the word about eRum 2016 in the Internet.

In addition we would like to thank Prof. Elżbieta Gołata, Prof. Grażyna Dehnel, Prof. Idzi Siatkowski, Prof. Anita Dobek and directors of the Statistical Office in Poznań (dr Jacek Kowalewski and dr Tomasz Klimanek) for their support in organizing the conference.

CRAN packages used

ggplot2, shiny, dplyr, caret, leaflet, sp, cluster, e1071, knitr, magrittr, randomForest, Rcpp, rgdal, rgeos, rmarkdown, rstan, SparkR

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Bayesian, Cluster, Databases, Distributions, Environmetrics, HighPerformanceComputing, MachineLearning, MissingData, MixedModels, ModelDeployment, NumericalMathematics, Phylogenetics, Psychometrics, ReproducibleResearch, Robust, Spatial, SpatioTemporal, TeachingStatistics, WebTechnologies

Note

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