by Aimee Gott

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that last week Aalborg, Denmark played host to the annual UseR conference.  This is an annual R conference bringing together users and developers from academia and industry.

With a record 650 attendees,  I think it’s fair to say it was a huge success. It was fantastic to see such a huge number of participants and a massive thanks and congratulations go to the organizing committee for such a successful and smooth running conference.

Andy Nicholls exhibiting for Mango Solutions at UseR!2015

As ever there was a range of talks covering everything from exciting new packages to sharing of experiences. However, what stood out the most to me was that unlike previous UseR conferences there didn’t seem to be one single theme, the thing that everyone was talking about and that everyone was going to be using by the end of next week.

Romain Francois on the big stage demonstrating his love of cats!

That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of interesting things to see and hear.

Dan Putler gave an interesting talk showing how easy it was to connect to Spark, and some of the things to watch out for in the MLlib library

Tony Fischetti showed us his really useful package assertr for data checking

Jennifer Bryan connected to Google Sheets and gave us some really nice examples of how R can be used to help out non-R users (yes, they do exist!).

There were plenty of Shiny apps to talk about too, including from invited speaker Di Cook, and a whole host of cool graphics, it’s worth taking a look at Andre de Vries’s network graph of R packages if you haven’t seen it yet.  So I think it’s clear that in fact there really was a theme, just not in the usual way – R is used by everyone in many ways in a whole host of industries, something we have seen for many years at Mango and is nice to now see reflected at UseR.

In between all the talks Mango the cat got about meeting the R community, we all enjoyed drinks at the Aalborg Music centre, an interesting evening of posters and we were let loose in the woods with axes, saws and bow and arrow (Yes really!).

Mango The Cat meets some stars from the R world! Clockwise: Matt Dowle, Arun Srinivasan and Jonathan Cornelissen, Karthik Ram, Dirk Eddelbuettel and Joe Cheng, Romain Francois

So what’s next? Well UseR 2016 will be hosted in Stanford, California. If you want something a little sooner EARL 2015 hosted by Mango Solutions comes to London in September and Boston in November, hope to see you there!