R User Group Roundup

by Joseph Rickert

In the first half of 2014, worldwide R user group activity continued to increase, showing impressive growth over the same periods for the past couple of years.  For the last four months, the pace has been over 50 meetings per month.

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There are now 147 user groups listed in Revolution Analytics' Local R User Group Directory. My take on this is that R is still exciting, and people find it worth some of their free time to seek out other R users to learn, to teach and to just talk. What follows is a small collage of some to the things that R users have been taking about.

UseR! 2014 is still generating some buzz. Here is one of serveral videos from the conference posted on the DataScience.LA website.

Be sure to check out some of the other videos including interviews with David Smith, Max Kuhn, Hadley Wickham and Tal Galili. But don't get stuck in the past, join the conversation about UseR! 2015 which will be held at Aalborg University in Demmark.  

Several R user groups continue to be very generous about making presentations and materials from their meetings available to everyone. Click on the figure to see Andy Lyon's presentation to the Berkeley Group

for a nice introduction to processing geospatial data in R based on the book Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R by Bivand, Prebesma and Gomez-Rubio.

David Springate's presentation to Manchester R is a mini survival kit for web scraping, and the case study it contains, Web mining for a new job, completely captures the mind set of the data scientist.

Click on the figure above to get started wity your 21st century job search.

Giovanni Fiorito's presentation to the seventh Torino R net meeting is a bit of a change of pace. However, even if you are not a bio-tech scientist, have a look to see how some of those mysterious Bioconductor packages are used.

If you still have an appetite for more, there are now over 70 R-related presentations avaiable for download on the Bay Area useR Group meetup site.

And finally, note that Revolution Analytics will be taking applications for vector level sponsorship under the 2014 Sponsorship Program until the end of September.