useR 2010 at NIST in Gaithersburg

This past week, the annual R user conference useR! 2010 took place at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD (which is a tad northwest of Washington, DC). Kate Mullen and her team of local organizers did a truly tremendous job in putting together a very smooth conference attended by almost 500 people. It is always nice to meet so many other R contributors and users in person. And needless to say it’s also just plain fun to hang out with these folks.

As at the preceding useR! 2008 in Dortmund and useR! 2009 in Rennes, I presented a three-hour tutorial on high-performance computing with R. This covers scripting/automation, profiling, vectorisation, interfacing compiled code, parallel computing and large-memory approaches. The slides, as well as a condensed 2-up version, are now on my presentations page.

On Wednesday, Romain and I had a chance to talk about recent work on Rcpp, our R and C++ integration. Thursday, we followed up with a presentation on RProtoBuf — a project integrating Google’s Protocol Buffers with R which much to our delight already seems to be in use at Google itself! It was quite fun to do these two talks jointly with Romain. But my other coauthor Khanh had to be at a conference related to his actual PhD work. So on Friday it was just me to give a presentation about RQuantLib which brings QuantLib to R.

Slides from all these talks have now been added to my presentations page. I will also upload them via the conference form so that they can be part of the conference’s collection of presentations which should be forthcoming.