Looking forward to 2016

by Joseph Rickert

The following map of all of the R user groups listed in Microsoft's Local R User Group Directory is good way to visualize the R world as we rocket into 2016. As a member of the useR!2016 planning committee, foremost in my mind right now is that in just a few months people will be coming to Stanford from all points plotted and almost everywhere in between.

I suppose I have a strong bias here, but this conference promises to be an outstanding event where Silicon Valley welcomes R. The invited speakers for useR! 2016 are  Richard Becker, Donald Knuth, Deborah Nolan, Simon Urbanek, Hadley Wickham and Daniela Witten and the invited tutorials already scheduled to be on the program are:

But all of this is only half the story. The rest depends on you. There are still several open slots for tutorials, and there is plenty of time to think about submitting an abstract for a contributed talk. Please, use one of the templates to submit your tutorial proposal and make sure it is received at useR-2016@R-project.org before the submissions deadline: midnight PST. The clock for contributed talks starts on January 5th and runs till March 25th.

Moreover, due to a special alignment of the stars in 2016 the Bioconductor Conference will also be held at Stanford from June 24th through the 26th making it possible to attend both conferences! The details should be up on the Bioconductor site soon. Bay Area hotels are notoriously expensive and there is limited capacity close to the campus, so if you are going to either useR! 2016 or BioC 2016 make you housing arrangements soon.

And – don't let all of this cosmic California talk distract you from planning for R/Finance 2016 which will be held May 20th and 21st in Chicago. If you have any interest at all in Finance (or Chicago), R/Finance is as good as it gets. The deadline for submissions is January 29th. You can find the details here.

And – don't forget that January 10th is also the deadline for submitting a proposal to the R-Consortium for the next round of funding. (You can find the details for submitting a proposal here.) The Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) has already received proposals for improving distributed computing in R, developing a package and API for retrieving package download statistics and building a framework for collecting R usage information at the function level. Don't miss this opportunity to get your ideas for work that could benefit the greater R Community in front of the ISC.

Finally, if you are thinking about starting an R user group in 2016 consider applying for support from Microsoft's Data Science User Group Sponsorship Program to get RUG going. You can find the application form here.