Chillin’ at UseR! 2014

This year’s UseR! conference was held at the University of California in Los Angeles. Despite the great weather and a nearby beach, most of the conference was spent in front of projector screens in 18° c (64° f) rooms because there were so many interesting presentations and tutorials going on. I was lucky to present my R package Bayesian First Aid and the slides can be found here:

There was so much great stuff going on at UseR! and here follows a random sample:

• John Chambers on Interfaces, Efficiency and Big Data. One of the creators of S (the predecessor of R) talked about the history of R and exiting new developments such as Rcpp11. He was also kind enough to to sign my copy of S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics, the original S book from 1984 🙂

• Yihui Xie the Knitr Ninja. Yihui held the most amazing presentation about how to be a Knitr ninja using only an R script and sound effects. The “anime sword” sound effect used by Yihui is just now available in the development version of beepr and can be played by running beep("sword").

• Romain François held both a tutorial and a presentation on the Rcpp11 package, a most convenient way of connecting R and C++.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel held a keynote on the topic of R, C++ and Rcpp, another convenient way of connecting R and C++. Do we see a theme here? He also talked about Docker which I never heard of before, which allows sort of light-weight virtual machines which can be easily built and distributed (this is my interpretation, which might be a bit off).

• Rstudio was otherwise running the show with great presentation with Winston Chang on ggvis, Joe Cheng on Shiny, J.J. Allaire and Kevin Ushey on Packrat – A Dependency Management System for R, Jeff Allen on The Next Generation of R Markdown and, of course, Hadley Wickham on dplyr: a grammar of data manipulation.

• Dieter De Mesmaeker presented a poster on Rdocumentation.org a really nice web-interface to the documentation of R.

All in all, a great conference! I’m already looking forward to next years UseR! conference which will be held at Aalborg University, not too far from where I live (at least compared to LA).