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UseR! 2011 slides and videos – on one page

Links to slides and talks from useR 2011 – all organized in one page.

I was recently reminded that the wonderful team at warwick University made sure to put online many of the slides (and some videos) of talks from the recent useR 2011 conference. You can browse through the talks by going between the timetables (where it will be the most updated, if more slides will be added later), but I thought it might be more convenient for some of you to have the links to all the talks (with slides/videos) in one place.

I am grateful for all of the wonderful people who put their time in making such an amazing event (organizers, speakers, attendees), and also for the many speakers who made sure to share their talk/slides online for all of us to reference. I hope to see this open-slides trend will continue in the upcoming useR conferences…

Bellow are all the links:

Tuesday 16th August

09:50 – 10:50	Kaleidoscope Ia, MS.03, Chair: Dieter Menne
	Claudia Beleites	Spectroscopic Data in R and Validation of Soft Classifiers: Classifying Cells and Tissues by Raman Spectroscopy	[Slides]
	Jonathan Rosenblatt	Revisiting Multi-Subject Random Effects in fMRI	[Slides]
	Zoe Hoare	Putting the R into Randomisation	[Slides]
	Kaleidoscope Ib, MS.01, Chair: Simon Urbanek
	Markus Gesmann	Using the Google Visualisation API with R	[Slides]
	Kaleidoscope Ic, MS.02, Chair: Achim Zeileis
	David Smith	The R Ecosystem	[Slides]
	E. James Harner	Rc2: R collaboration in the cloud	[Slides]
11:15 – 12:35	Portfolio Management, B3.02, Chair: Patrick Burns
	Jagrata Minardi	R in the Practice of Risk Management Today	[Slides]
	Bioinformatics and High-Throughput Data, B3.03, Chair: Hervé Pagès
	Thierry Onkelinx	AFLP: generating objective and repeatable genetic data	[Slides]
	High Performance Computing, MS.03, Chair: Stefan Theussl
	Willem Ligtenberg	GPU computing and R	[Slides]
	Manuel Quesada	OBANSoft: integrated software for Bayesian statistics and high performance computing with R	[Slides]
	Reporting Technologies and Workflows, MS.01, Chair: Martin Mächler
	Andreas Leha	The Emacs Org-mode: Reproducible Research and Beyond	[Slides]
	Teaching, MS.02, Chair: Jay G. Kerns
	Ian Holliday	Teaching Statistics to Psychology Students using Reproducible Computing package RC and supporting Peer Review Framework	[Slides]
	Achim Zeileis	Automatic generation of exams in R	[Slides]
14:00 – 14:45	Invited Talk, MS.01/MS.02, Chair: David Firth
	Ulrike Grömping	Design of Experiments in R	[Slides] [Video]
14:45 – 15:30	Invited Talk, MS.01/MS.02, Chair: David Firth
	Jonathan Rougier	Nomograms for visualising relationships between three variables	[Slides] [Video]
16:00 – 17:00	Modelling Systems and Networks, B3.02, Chair: Jonathan Rougier
	Rachel Oxlade	An S4 Object structure for emulation – the approximation of complex functions	[Slides]
	Christophe Dutang	Computation of generalized Nash equilibria	[Slides]
	Visualisation, MS.04, Chair: Antony Unwin
	Andrej Blejec	animatoR: dynamic graphics in R	[Slides]
	Richard M. Heiberger	Graphical Syntax for Structables and their Mosaic Plots	[Slides]
	Dimensionality Reduction and Variable Selection, MS.01, Chair: Matthias Schmid
	Marie Chavent	ClustOfVar: an R package for the clustering of variables	[Slides]
	Jürg Schelldorfer	Variable Screening and Parameter Estimation for High-Dimensional Generalized Linear Mixed Models Using l1-Penalization	[Slides]
	Benjamin Hofner	gamboostLSS: boosting generalized additive models for location, scale and shape	[Slides]
	Business Management, MS.02, Chair: Enrico Branca
	Marlene S. Marchena	SCperf: An inventory management package for R	[Slides]
	Pairach Piboonrungroj	Using R to test transaction cost measurement for supply chain relationship: A structural equation model	[Slides]
	Fabrizio Ortolani	Integrating R and Excel for automatic business forecasting
17:05 – 18:05	Lightning Talks		(see bellow)

Lightning Talks

Community and Communication, MS.02, Chair: Ashley Ford

George Zhang: China R user conference [Slides]
Tal Galili: Blogging and R – present and future [Link]
Markus Schmidberger: Get your R application onto a powerful and fully-configured Cloud Computing environment in less than 5 minutes. [Slides]
Eirini Koutoumanou: Teaching R to Non Package Literate Users [Slides]
Randall Pruim: Teaching Statistics using the mosaic Package [Slides]

Statistics and Programming, MS.01, Chair: Elke Thönnes

Toby Dylan Hocking: Fast, named capture regular expressions in R2.14 [Slides]
John C. Nash: Developments in optimization tools for R [Slides]
Christophe Dutang: A Unified Approach to fit probability distributions [Slides]

Package Showcase, MS.03, Chair: Jennifer Rogers

James Foadi: cRy: statistical applications in macromolecular crystallography [Slides]
Emilio López: Six Sigma is possible with R [Slides]
Jonathan Clayden: Medical image processing with TractoR [Slides]
Richard A. Bilonick: Using merror 2.0 to Analyze Measurement Error and Determine Calibration Curves [Slides]

Wednesday 17th August

09:00 – 09:50	Invited Talk, MS.01/MS.02, Chair: Ioannis Kosmidis
	Lee E. Edlefsen	Scalable Data Analysis in R	[Slides] [Video]
11:15 – 12:35	Spatio-Temporal Statistics, B3.02, Chair: Julian Stander
	Nikolaus Umlauf	Structured Additive Regression Models: An R Interface to BayesX	[Slides]
	Molecular and Cell Biology, B3.03, Chair: Andrea Foulkes
	Matthew Nunes	Summary statistics selection for ABC inference in R	[Slides]
	Maarten van Iterson	Power and minimal sample size for multivariate analysis of microarrays	[Slides]
	Mixed Effect Models, MS.03, Chair: Douglas Bates
	Ulrich Halekoh	Kenward-Roger modification of the F-statistic for some linear mixed models fitted with lmer	[Slides]
	Marco Geraci	lqmm: Estimating Quantile Regression Models for Independent and Hierarchical Data with R	[Slides]
	Kenneth Knoblauch	Mixed-effects Maximum Likelihood Difference Scaling	[Slides]
	Programming, MS.01, Chair: Uwe Ligges
	Ray Brownrigg	Tricks and Traps for Young Players	[Slides]
	Friedrich Schuster	Software design patterns in R	[Slides]
	Patrick Burns	Random input testing with R	[Slides]
	Data Mining Applications, MS.02, Chair: Przemysaw Biecek
	Stephan Stahlschmidt	Predicting the offender’s age
	Daniel Chapsky	Leveraging Online Social Network Data and External Data Sources to Predict Personality	[Slides]
14:45 – 15:30	Invited Talk, MS.01/MS.02, Chair: John Aston
	Brandon Whitcher	Quantitative Medical Image Analysis	[Slides] [Video]
16:00 – 17:00	Development of R, B3.02, Chair: John C. Nash
	Andrew R. Runnalls	Interpreter Internals: Unearthing Buried Treasure with CXXR	[Slides]
	Geospatial Techniques, B3.03, Chair: Roger Bivand
	Binbin Lu	Converting a spatial network to a graph in R	[Slides]
	Rainer M Krug	Spatial modelling with the R-GRASS Interface	[Slides]
	Daniel Nüst	sos4R – Accessing SensorWeb Data from R	[Slides]
	Genomics and Bioinformatics, MS.03, Chair: Ramón Diaz-Uriarte
	Sebastian Gibb	MALDIquant: Quantitative Analysis of MALDI-TOF Proteomics Data	[Slides]
	Regression Modelling, MS.01, Chair: Cristiano Varin
	Bettina Grün	Beta Regression: Shaken, Stirred, Mixed, and Partitioned	[Slides]
	Rune Haubo B. Christensen	Regression Models for Ordinal Data: Introducing R-package ordinal	[Slides]
	Giuseppe Bruno	Multiple choice models: why not the same answer? A comparison among LIMDEP, R, SAS and Stata	[Slides]
	R in the Business World, MS.02, Chair: David Smith
	Derek McCrae Norton	Odysseus vs. Ajax: How to build an R presence in a corporate SAS environment	[Slides]
17:05 – 18:05	Hydrology and Soil Science, B3.02, Chair: Thomas Petzoldt
	Wayne Jones	GWSDAT (GroundWater Spatiotemporal Data Analysis Tool)	[Slides]
	Pierre Roudier	Visualisation and modelling of soil data using the aqp package	[Slides]
	Biostatistical Modelling, B3.03, Chair: Holger Hoefling
	Annamaria Guolo	Higher-order likelihood inference in meta-analysis using R	[Slides]
	Cristiano Varin	Gaussian copula regression using R	[Slides]
	Psychometrics, MS.03, Chair: Yves Rosseel
	Florian Wickelmaier	Multinomial Processing Tree Models in R	[Slides]
	Basil Abou El-Komboz	Detecting Invariance in Psychometric Models with the psychotree Package	[Slides]
	Multivariate Data, MS.01, Chair: Peter Dalgaard
	John Fox	Tests for Multivariate Linear Models with the car Package	[Slides]
	Julie Josse	missMDA: a package to handle missing values in and with multivariate exploratory data analysis methods	[Slides]
	António Pedro Duarte Silva	MAINT.DATA: Modeling and Analysing Interval Data in R	[Slides]
	Interfaces, MS.02, Chair: Matthew Shotwell
	Xavier de Pedro Puente	Web 2.0 for R scripts and workflows: Tiki and PluginR	[Slides]
	Sheri Gilley	A new task-based GUI for R	[Slides]

Thursday 18th August

09:00 – 09:45	Invited Talk, MS.01/MS.02, Chair: Julia Brettschneider
	Wolfgang Huber	Genomes and phenotypes	[Slides] [Video]
09:50 – 10:50	Financial Models, B3.02, Chair: Giovanni Petris
	Peter Ruckdeschel	(Robust) Online Filtering in Regime Switching Models and Application to Investment Strategies for Asset Allocation	[Slides]
	Ecology and Ecological Modelling, B3.03, Chair: Karline Soetaert
	Christian Kampichler	Using R for the Analysis of Bird Demography on a Europe-wide Scale	[Slides]
	John C. Nash	An effort to improve nonlinear modeling practice	[Slides]
	Generalized Linear Models, MS.03, Chair: Kenneth Knoblauch
	Ioannis Kosmidis	brglm: Bias reduction in generalized linear models	[Slides]
	Merete K. Hansen	The binomTools package: Performing model diagnostics on binomial regression models	[Slides]
	Reporting Data, MS.01, Chair: Martyn Plummer
	Sina Rüeger	uniPlot – A package to uniform and customize R graphics	[Slides]
	Alexander Kowarik	sparkTable: Generating Graphical Tables for Websites and Documents with R	[Slides]
	Isaac Subirana	compareGroups package, updated and improved	[Slides]
	Process Optimization, MS.02, Chair: Tobias Verbeke
	Emilio López	Six Sigma Quality Using R: Tools and Training	[Slides]
	Thomas Roth	Process Performance and Capability Statistics for Non-Normal Distributions in R	[Slides]
11:15 – 12:35	Inference, B3.02, Chair: Peter Ruckdeschel
	Henry Deng	Density Estimation Packages in R	[Slides]
	Population Genetics and Genetics Association Studies, B3.03, Chair: Martin Morgan
	Benjamin French	Simple haplotype analyses in R	[Slides]
	Neuroscience, MS.03, Chair: Brandon Whitcher
	Karsten Tabelow	Statistical Parametric Maps for Functional MRI Experiments in R: The Package fmri	[Slides]
	Data Management, MS.01, Chair: Barry Rowlingson
	Susan Ranney	It’s a Boy! An Analysis of Tens of Millions of Birth Records Using R	[Slides]
	Joanne Demmler	Challenges of working with a large database of routinely collected health data: Combining SQL and R	[Slides]
	Interactive Graphics in R, MS.02, Chair: Paul Murrell
	Richard Cotton	Easy Interactive ggplots	[Slides]
14:00 – 15:00	Kaleidoscope IIIa, MS.03, Chair: Adrian Bowman
	Thomas Petzoldt	Using R for systems understanding – a dynamic approach	[Slides]
	David L. Miller	Using multidimensional scaling with Duchon splines for reliable finite area smoothing	[Slides]
	Alastair Sanderson	Studying galaxies in the nearby Universe, using R and ggplot2	[Slides]
	Kaleidoscope IIIb, MS.02, Chair: Frank Harrell
	Paul Murrell	Vector Image Processing	[Slides]

The present and future of the R blogosphere (~7 minute video from useR2011)

This is (roughly) the lightning talk I gave in useR2011. If you are a reader of R-bloggers.com then this talk is not likely to tell you anything new. However, if you have a friend, college or student who is a new useRs of R, this talk will offer him a decent introduction to what the R […]

The talk is a call for people of the R community to participate more in reading, writing and interacting with blogs.

I was encouraged to record this talk per the request of Chel Hee Lee, so it may be used in the recent useR conference in Korea (2011)

The talk (briefly) goes through:

The widespread influence of the R blogosphere
What R bloggers write about
How to encourage a blogger you enjoy reading to keep writing
How to start your own R blog (just go to wordpress.com)
Basic tips about writing a blog
One advice about marketing your R blog (add it to R-bloggers.com)
And two thoughts about the future of R blogging (more bloggers and readers, and more interactive online visualization)

My apologies for any of the glitches in my English. For more talks about R, you can visit the R user groups blog. I hope more speakers from useR 2011 will consider uploading their talks online.

Call for proposals for writing a book about R (via Chapman & Hall/CRC)

Rob Calver wrote an interesting invitation on the R mailing list today, inviting potential authors to submit their vision of the next great book about R. The announcement originated from the Chapman & Hall/CRC publishing houses, backed up by an impressive team of R celebrities, chosen as the editors of this new R books series, including:

Bellow is the complete announcement:
Continue reading “Call for proposals for writing a book about R (via Chapman & Hall/CRC)”

R-bloggers in 2010: Top 14 R posts, site statistics and invitation for sponsors

A year ago (on December 9th 2009), I wrote about founding R-bloggers.com, an (unofficial) online R journal written by bloggers who agreed to contribute their R articles to the site.

In this post I wish to celebrate R-bloggers’ first birthday by sharing with you:

Links to the top 14 posts of 2010
Reflections about the origin of R-bloggers
Statistics on “how well” R-bloggers did this year
Links to other related projects
An invitation for sponsors/supporters to help keep the site alive

Continue reading “R-bloggers in 2010: Top 14 R posts, site statistics and invitation for sponsors”

A competition to recommend "relevant" R packages – and the future of R

Update: the competition was just launched.
* * *

What is the competition about?

Drew Conway and John Myles Whyte have collected data from (52) R users about the packages they have installed. The data is now available on github for download and the contest will be run on the kaggle platform.

For more details, head over to dataists.

And for fun, here is the dependency graph for R packages they have assembled so far:

A graphical visualization of packages’ “suggestion” relationships. Affectionately referred to as the R Flying Spaghetti Monster. More info below.

A tiny bit more on R bloggers virality

Continue reading “A competition to recommend "relevant" R packages – and the future of R”

R syntax highlighting for bloggers on WordPress.com

Announcing the ability to highlight R syntax in WordPress.com blogs, thanks to the recent work of Yihui Xie, Yoav Farhi and Andrew Redd.

Good news for R bloggers who are using WordPress.com to host their blog.

This week, the good people running WordPress.com (special thanks goes to Yoav Farhi), have added the ability for all the users of the WordPress.com platform to be able to highlight their R code inside posts.

Basically you’ll need to wrap the code in your post like this:

[sourcecode language="r"]
test.function = function(r) {
    return(pi * r^2)
}
test.function(1)
[/sourcecode]

(Which will then look like this:
r syntax highlighted code example
)

Further details (and other supported languages) can be read about on this WordPress.com support page.

This new feature was possible thanks to the work of Yihui Xie (who create the ~~famous~~ cool animation package for R), who created a R syntax brush for the syntaxhighlighter WordPress plugin (the plugin used by WordPress.com for sytnax highlighting) . And thanks should also go to Andrew Redd, the creator of NppToR (which connects between notepad++ to R). He both made some good suggestions, and was game to take on the brush creation in case there would be problems, which thankfully so far there aren’t any)

p.s: If you are a WordPress.org users (e.g: have a self hosted WordPress blog) and want to enable R syntax highlighting for your blog, I would recommend the use of the WP-Syntax plugin (enhanced with GeSHi version 1.0.8.6) which can be downloaded here.

Open source and money – why paying R developers might not always help the project

This post can be summed up by ~~one~~ two sentences: ~~“We can’t buy love.”~~ “Starting to pay for love could make it disappear” while at the same time “We need money to live and love”. These two conflicting forces, with relation to open source, are the topic of this post.

This post is directed to the community of R users but is relevant to people of all open source projects. It deals with the question of open source projects and funding. Specifically, should a community of open source developers and users, once it exists, want to start raising/donating money to the main code contributers?

The conflict arises when, on the one side, we intuitively wish to repay the people who have helped us but worry of the implications of behavioral studies that suggests that doing so might destroy the motivation of the developers to continue working without contently getting payed, and that making the shift from doing something for one reason (whatever it is) to doing it for money, might not easily be turned back.
On the other side, developers needs to make a (good) living, and we (as a community) should strive for them to be well payed.
How can these two be reconciled?

This article won’t offer a decisive conclusions – and my hope is to invite discussion on the matter (from both amatures and professionals in the field of open source and behavioral economics) so to give more ideas for people to base their opinions on.

Update: this post was substantially updated from it’s original version, thanks to responses both in the comments, and especially in the e-mails. I apologies for writing a post that had needed so many corrections, and at the same time I am grateful for all the people who took the time to shed light in places where I was wrong.

* * * *

Motivation: R has issues – how do we get them fixed?

In the past two weeks there has been a raging debate regarding the future of R (hint: “what is R“). Without going deeper into the topic (I already wrote about it here, where you too can go and respond), I’ll sum up the issue with a quote from Ross Ihaka (one of the two founders of R) who recently wrote:

I’ve been worried for some time that R isn’t going to provide the base that we’re going to need for statistical computation in the future. (It may well be that the future is already upon us.) There are certainly efficiency problems (speed and memory use), but there are more fundamental issues too. Some of these were inherited from S and some are peculiar to R.

After this, several discussion threads where started around the web (for example: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6 ), but then a comment was made in the R-help mailing list by Jaroslaw Piskorski who wrote:

A few days ago Tal Galili posted a message about some controversies concerning the future of R. Having read the discussions, especially those following Ross Ihaka’s post, I have come to the conclusion, that, as usual, the problem is money. I doubt there would be discussions about dropping R in its present form if the R-Foundation were properly funded and could hire computer scientists, programmers and statisticians. If a commercial company is able to provide big-database and multicore solutions, then so would a properly founded R-Foundation.

To which my response is that: I ~~strongly~~ disagree with this statement..
That is, I do agree that money could help with things. It could be that money could be a part of the solution. But I doubt that the core of this problem is money. Nor that it would be solved if we could only now hire “computer scientists, programmers and statisticians” (although that could be part of the solution).

And the reason I am doubtful stems from two sources:

Continue reading “Open source and money – why paying R developers might not always help the project”

Richard Stallman talk+Q&A at the useR! 2010 conference (audio files attached)

The audio files of the full talk by Richard Stallman are attached to the end of this post.

—————–

Videos of all the invited talks of the useR! 2010 conference can be viewed on the R User Group blog

—————–

Last week I had the honor of attending the talk given by Richard Stallman, the last keynote speaker on the useR 2010 conference. In this post I will give a brief context for the talk, and then give the audio files of the talk, with some description of what was said in the talk.

Context for the talk

Richard Stallman can be viewed as (one of) the fathers of free software (free as in speech, not as in beer).

He is the man who led the GNU project for the creation of a free (as in speech, not as in beer) operation systems on the basis of which GNU-Linux, with its numerous distributions, was created.
Richard also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs,[4] the GNU Compiler Collection,[5], the GNU Debugger[6], and many tools in the GNU Coreutils

Richard also initiated the free software movement and in October 1985 he also founded it’s formal foundation and co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Stallman pioneered the concept of “copyleft” and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

You can read about him in the wiki article titles “Richard Stallman”

The useR 2010 conference is an annual 4 days conference of the community of people using R. R is a free open source software for data analysis and statistical computing (Here is a bit more about what is R).

The conference this year was truly a wonderful experience for me. I had the pleasure of giving two talks (about which I will blog later this month), listened to numerous talks on the use of R, and had a chance to meet many (many) kind and interesting people.

Richard Stallmans talk

The talk took place on July 23rd 2010 at NIST U.S. and was the concluding talk for the useR2010 conference. The talk consisted of a two hour lecture followed by a half-hour question and answer session.

On a personal note, I was very impressed by Richards talk. Richard is not a shy computer geek, but rather a serious leader and thinker trying to stir people to action. His speech was a sermon on free software, the history of GNU-Linux, the various versions of GPL, and his own history involving them.

I believe this talk would be of interest to anyone who cares about social solidarity, free software, programming and the hope of a better world for all of us.

I am eager for your thoughts in the comments (but please keep a kind tone).

Here is Richard Stallmans (2 hours) talk:

Continue reading “Richard Stallman talk+Q&A at the useR! 2010 conference (audio files attached)”

June 20, online Registration deadline for useR! 2010

useR!2010 is coming. I am going to give two talks there (I will write more of that soon), but in the meantime, please note that the online registration deadline is coming to an end.

This was published on the R-help mailing list today:

————-

The final registration deadline for the R User Conference is June 20,
2010, one week away. Later registration will not be possible on site!

Conference webpage: http://www.R-project.org/useR-2010
Conference program: http://www.R-project.org/useR-2010/program.html

Registration:
http://www.R-project.org/useR-2010/registration/registration.html

The conference is scheduled for July 21-23, 2010, and will take place at
the campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in
Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.

Continue reading “June 20, online Registration deadline for useR! 2010”

Tag: R community

Top 20 R posts of 2011 (and some R-bloggers statistics)

1. Top 24 R posts of 2011

2. Statistics – how well did R-bloggers do this year

3. Invitation to sponsor/advertise on R-bloggers