Video: Two R talks from Hadley Wickham

On his recent tour to the Bay Area, Hadley Wickham have two interesting R-related talks, for which video has been made available by Google Tech Talks.

At the June Bay Area R User Group meeting, Hadley spoke on the future of interactive data visualization in R. Building on his experiences creating the ggplot2 package (which is still under development — he's working to improve its performance and to visualize massive data sets with the Revolution Analytics big-data objects, for example), he's also working on a series of packages to make it possible to write high-performance interactive graphics just using R code. In the video below, he gives examples of pointing-and-clicking to reveal data on maps, to interact with code profiles to optimize performance, and creating a series of linked charts (where, say, a data value highlighted on a scatterplot will also highlight the same value in a parallel coordinates plot). The plan is to have these new pacakges available by the end of the Summer.

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His second talk (a Google Tech Talk) was about why engineers should use a programming language (specifically, R) for analyzing data. It's a more general introduction to data analysis and the benefits of programming with data, and would be a great introductory video for anyone new to R. 

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Hadley is also giving a two-day short course on Data Visualization and the Analysis of Financial Time Series in Houston in July (follow the link for details and registration info).