Some R Conferences in 2015

by Joseph Rickert

For the past few years, the Strata + Hadoop World Conference in San Jose has kicked off my personal conference season. With its focus on Data Science, Strata always seems to present some interesting R related talks, and I am looking forward to the various events over the next couple of days. But, Strata and other large conferences like the JSM, are just too big to easily find presentations that explicitly highlight R. So, if you would like to plan your conference season around R, the following list presents some R themed conferences that will be taking place mostly during the first half of this year.

The GDR Ecology Statistics group will be holding the GDR EcoStat meeting on the 12th and 13th of March in Lyon. The conference will be organized around ten themes including evolutionary ecology and population dynamics and demography “qui transcendent les modèles biologiques”. The group lists a number of R packages on their website and I expect that the conference will produce many R related talks.

Several prominent R developers will attend the rOpenSci Unconf (an “unhackathon” this year) which will take place on the 26th and 27th of March in San Francisco. This is an invitation only event, however if you would like to attend, there is still time to nominate yourself.

The Fourth Annual Joint Conference of the Upstate Chapters of the American Statistical Association will take place in Geneseo, New York on April 10th and 11th. Professor Kosuke Imai from Princeton University, author of several R packages, will be the keynote speaker. The deadline for abstract submission is February 27th.

The PASS Business Analytics Conference will be held in Santa Clara, California April 21-22. David Smith will be a featured speaker, talking about Real-Time Big Data Analytics with R.

The Applied Statistics in Public Policy Evaluation workshop will be held on April 22nd through April 25th at the Univesidad Santo Tomas in Bogata. Hadley Wickham will be one of the keynote speakers. The call for papers ends on March 8th.

New Challenges for Statistical Software – The Use of R in Official Statistics – the 3rd international conference will be held in Bucharest on April 23rd and 24th. All of the research papers from this conference will be published in the Romanian Statistical Review.

The UCLA datafest, which will provide plenty of opportunity for students to do some serious R coding will take place over the May 2nd weekend. The organizers are still looking for sponsors.

R/Finance 2015: Applied Finance with R will be held on May 29th and 30th at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Emanuel Derman (Models Behaving Badly and My Life as a Quant) will be one of the keynote speakers. R/Finance is my personal favorite. It is a relatively small, single track conference featuring high quality talks of varying length, very little fluff, and plenty of opportunities to network with some very knowledgeable R adepts.

The ASA Wisconsin Chapter Big Data Conference, which will be held in Milwaukee on June 5th, will feature Revolution Analytics’ David Smith as a keynote speaker. The website is not in place yet, but if you would like to know more please contact the Secretary/Treasurer of the Wisconsin Chapter of the ASA for more info:  Elizabeth Smith <elsmith@mcw.edu>.

The 9th International Conference on Extreme Value Analysis will be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on June 15th to 19th. Stilian Stoev, one of the conference organizers, writes: “. . .much of the state-of-the-art software for statistics of extremes is written in R. We plan to organize a small hands-on workshop prior to the main conference, where students and practitioners will be introduced to the most popular R-packages for extreme value analysis. In fact, it is likely the the people who are currently maintaining these packages will be the instructors! “. Abstracts are due on February 27th.

missData2015, the missing value conference, will be held at the Agrocampus Ouest in Rennes on July 18th and 19th. Stefan van Buuren, maintainer and author of mice and Christophe Biernacki, an author of the Mixmod package, are among the invited speakers. Poster submission is open until April 1st. Follow the event on twitter.

Quatrième Rencontres R will be held in Grenoble on June 24th through 26th. The purpose of these yearly meetings is to provide: “a place of exchange and sharing ideas on the use of the software R in different disciplines (visualization, applied statistics, biostatistics and bioinformatics, Bayesian statistics, data analysis, Big Data, modeling, machine learning, high performance computing …)”. The deadline for submissions in April 7th.

The 9th RMetrics Summer Workshop will be held from June 25th through June 27th at the Villa Hatt in Zurich. Topics this year will include vulnerabilities, structural stability, and the stress resistivity of financial markets.

useR! 2015 will be held from June 30th through July 3rd in Aalborg, Denmark. This looks like it is going to be a spectacular event with invited talks from Thomas Lumley ,Adrian Baddeley, Steffen Lauritzen, Di Cook, Romain François, and Susan Holmes. Abstract submissions are due April 10th.

BioC2015, the the annual conference of the BioConductor project, will be held in Seattle on July 20th through 22nd. The conference website is just being built, so please check back later for details.

The biannual Alacip Escuela (ALACIP School for Policy Analysis) conference which will be held at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) in Lima on July 21st through 24th will feature several days of R workshops.

EARL 2015 (Effective use of the R Language) London, will be held on September 14th through 16th. Abstract submission closes on March 31st. Revolution Analytics' Andrie de Vries will be speaking. Follow the event on twitter.

EARL 2015 Boston, will be held from November 2nd through 4th. David Smith will be among the speakers.

I am sure that I have not managed to generate a complete list, and I do apologize if I have missed something important. But, please do send me a note and I will at least get the event listed in Revolution Analytic’s Community Calendar.