It’s gutted that I could not attend useR! 2012 after having a great time at useR!2011 at Warwick.

However, a great active online community of useRs allows me to get lots of goods stuffs from the conference even though I did not attend physically.

By keep following the #useR2012 and #rstats in Twitter and reading some great posts from R-bloggerRs on the useR! 2012, the the highlights I got are an emerging of the reproducible research with knitr package and its integration in R Studio as well as a good collection of pre-conference short course by Bill Venables.

My Highlights 

1. knitr
   As expected, many of #useR2012 tweets were about knitr and its creator Yihui Xie. Even though an existence of Sweave which allow one to build a reproducible report by  integrating text and R code into one document, its learning curve is quite steep. For my experience, it took me quite a while to set up emac and ESS and actually produce the first Sweave document. However it seems worth while to learn for the long term benefits of my teaching and research.Moreover, an integration between knitr and R Studio (IDE for R)has taken reproducible report and research to another level as well as expand the wider useRs. With the use of R Studio and knir, one can be able to make a reproducible report and research in minutes as I did. Here is my previous post on reproducible report & research with knitr in R Studio.Back to useR! 2012. It’s very glad to read the presentation by Yihui Xie (knitr) and JJ Allaire (R Studio) on ‘New Tools for Reproducible Research with R’ (slides).
2. R short course
   As Frank Harrell mentioned in useR! 2011 that there will be a pre-conference short course, and it was constructed by well-known useR and statistician Bill Venables. I found that one may learn a lot just by reading slides and follow the codes provided in this link.

What others say about useR! 2012?

• David Smith on useR! 2012 Highlights 
• Steve Miller on Crash Courses in Data Science
• EnRiMa project at the 8th International R Users
• North Bridge UseR 2012 Highlight
• Stephanie Kovalchik useR 2012 kicks off in RSS’s Significance Magazine
• Ezra Haber Glenn on  acs package at upcoming conference user 2012
• Jerzy Wieczorek on useR 2012: impressions, tutorials