As a co-organizer, it was a great pleasure to see so many users of R in Finance—from both industry and academia—come to Chicago to discuss and share recent work. There is a lot going on, and it is always good to exchange ideas with others sharing the same infrastructure. Participants appeared to enjoy the conference. My thanks to everybody who helped to put it together, from the local committee to the helping hands at UIC and of course the sponsors.

I just put my slides from the Extending and Embedding R with C++ tutorial preceding the conference, as well as the RQuantLib: Interfacing QuantLin from R presentation (with Khanh Nguyen), up onto my presentations page. I do have a usb-drive with all conference presentations and will provide them via the R / Finance site in a few days.

The only truly sour note is the fact that several presenters from Europe had their travels schedules turned upside down by the disruption to international air travel caused by the Icelandic volcano eruption and the resulting ash clouds. While we are glad to have had them for a little longer in Chicago, we understand that they are getting eager to return home. I hope this extended stay in the Windy City does not take away from the overall usefulness of the trip.