Di Cook and I are organizing a workshop on “Making data analysis easier” for 18-19 February 2016.

We are calling it WOMBAT2016, which an acronym for Workshop Organized by the Monash Business Analytics Team. Appropriately, it will be held at the Melbourne Zoo. Our plan is to make these workshops an annual event.

Some details are available on the workshop website. Key features are:

• Hadley Wickham is our keynote speaker. He has been instrumental in changing the way we think about data analysis, and providing new tools for tidying, rearranging, summarising and plotting data. His R packages (including tidyr, dplyr, ggplot2, and ggvis) are very widely used.

• Other speakers include Phil Brierley, Eugene Dubossarsky, Heike Hofmann, Thomas Lumley, Andrew Robinson, Elle Saber, Carson Sievert, Zoe van Havre, Geoff Webb, Yanchang Zhao, as well as Di and me.

• The numbers are limited to a total of 100 with a quota on students, academics and people from business/industry. The aim is to have a good mix of people from different backgrounds to encourage productive discussions and mutual learning.

• Register on Eventbrite.

• We also have some places available for contributing speakers (15 minute talks). If you would like to do a contributed talk, you will need to email us a title and abstract by 15 January. We will notify you if your peer-reviewed abstract is successful by 29 January.

If you miss out on the workshop, you can still hear Hadley speak. Data Science Melbourne will host a meetup featuring him in the evening of Monday 22 February 2016.