Plotcon 2016 – Speakers and topics in R

Jenny Bryan

Topic: Extract plotting intent from spreadsheets in R

Bio: Jennifer Bryan is an Associate Professor in the Statistics Department and the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She’s a biostatistician specialized in genomics and takes a special interest and delight in data analysis and statistical computing.

Kent Russell

Topic: Research in Finance Alive with Interactivity

Bio: Kent blends technology and finance as a portfolio manager in Birmingham, Alabama. His favorite tool is R combined with HTML/JavaScript to explore, decide, and communicate. Last year he built a R htmlwidget each week at http://buildingwidgets.com.

Hadley Wickham

Topic: New open viz in R

Bio: Hadley is Chief Scientist at RStudio and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) that make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr), data ingest (readr, readxl, haven), and principled software development (roxygen2, testthat, devtools). He is also a writer, educator, and frequent speaker promoting the use of R for data science.

Nick Elprin

Topic: Automating visualization with cloud task scheduling

Bio: Before starting Domino, Nick was a senior technologist and technology manager at Bridgewater Associates, where he managed a team that designed, developed, and delivered Bridgewater’s next generation research platform. He has a BA and MS from Harvard College in computer science.

Carson Sievert

Topic: Practical tools for exploratory web graphics

Bio: Carson is a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University working on interactive graphics, statistical computation, sports statistics, and web technologies. Carson is primarily interested in problems where visualization can augment/enhance/improve statistical methods and/or automated tasks. He is the lead R developer at Plotly.

Kristen Beck

Topic: Bringing microscopic data to life using R Markdown and Plotly

Bio: Dr. Beck is a research staff member in the Industrial and Applied Genomics group at IBM Research. As a bioinformatician, she contributes to the development of a web application for exploration and analysis of microbiomes of food ingredient. This research is part of the Consortium for Sequencing the Food Supply Chain which aims to detect pathogenic bacteria, identify food fraud, and detect antimicrobial resistance. Terabytes of sequencing and derived data must be processed into intelligible reports for a nonscientist user. Enhanced visualizations are essential for distilling dense data and for communicating scientific results that have broader implications for food safety. Dr. Beck received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology with a Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology from the University of California, Davis. She was the recipient of two NIH Doctoral T32 Training Grants in Bimolecular Technology and Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Michael Freeman

Topic: Visualizing Concepts with D3.js

Bio: Michael Freeman is a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Information School where he teaches courses on interactive data visualization, web development, and data science. With a background in public health (MPH), Michael is passionate about developing visual narratives to help explain complex concepts to broad audiences.

David Robinson

Topic: gganimate: Animation within the grammar of graphics

Bio: David Robinson is a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow. In May 2015 he received his PhD in Quantitative and Computational Biology from Princeton University, where he worked with John Storey on statistical genomics and experiment design. He is the author of the broom, fuzzyjoin and gganimate R packages, and writes about R, statistics, and education at his blog Variance Explained.

Sahir Bhatnager

Topic: Finance visualizations for quants in R

Bio: Sahir is a PhD student at McGill University. His is interested in statistical methods for synthesizing genomic data. His current research focuses on developing a methodological approach for identifying clusters of features that are sensitive to environmental exposures.

Tanya Cashorali

Topic: Sports data viz in R and R Shiny

Bio: Tanya Cashorali is the Chief Data Officer of Stattleship – a Boston-based sports content and data business that connects brands with sports fans through social media. She is also the founding partner of TCB Analytics – a Boston-based data consultancy. Tanya started her career in the data-rich field of bioinformatics and applied her experience to other data-rich verticals such as telecom, finance and sports. She brings over 10 years of experience in data scientist roles as well as managing and training data analysts. She’s helped grow a handful of Boston startups and prior to launching TCB Analytics, she worked as a data scientist at the Fortune 500 Biogen.