We spent last week in the LA area and had a generally good time out west. I was able to sneak in two talks and a group discussion, thanks to the help by Jan de Leeuw (and everybody at UCLA’s Stats department) as well as by Szilard Pafka representing the LA R User’s Group. Pdf files for the slides for the talks are now on my presentations page in both a compact handout and presentation slide version (where the content is identical; if in doubt use the first file).

The talks centered around R and C++ integration using both Rcpp and RInside and summarise where both projects stand after all the recent work Romain and I put in over the last few months. The presentations went fairly well; I received some favourable comments.

Szilard and the R User Group had also suggested a group discussion about CRAN, its growth and how to maximise its usefulness. Given my CRANberries feed, my work on the CRAN Task Views for Empirical Finance and High-Performance Computing with R as well as our cran2deb binary package generator, I had some views and ideas that helped frame the discussion which turned out to very useful and informed. So maybe we should do this User Group thing in Chicago too!

Special thanks to Jan de Leeuw and Szilard Pafka for organising the meeting, talks and discussion.