Reflections on EARL London 2016

The Mango Solutions team have done it again: another excellent Effective Applications of R (EARL) conference just wrapped up here in London. The conference was attended by almost 400 R users from companies all around the world, and was a really fun experience. I was honored to deliver a keynote presentation, alonside keynotes from Joe Cheng and Garrett Grolemund (RStudio), Lou Bajuk (Tibco), Gabor Csardi (R Consortium's R Hub project) and a thought-provoking presentation on machine learning and AI from the Economist's Kenneth Cukier. There was also a fantastic social program, including a dinner inside the 1000-year-old White Tower at the Tower of London. (Many thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring this memorable evening!)

Photo Credit: Andy

As always though, the focus of the EARL conference is on applications of the R language, and this week's event showcased many real-world uses of R in major companies. Some application highlights include:

• The Financial Times uses R for quantitative journalism
• The British Museum uses R to predict attendance at special exhibitions
• Beazley uses R with SQL Server to analyze insurance data
• Investec's IT department supports R usage for asset management with a standardized suite including RStudio, Revolution R Open and DeployR
• Syngenta uses R to improve global food security
• Maersk uses R to optimize capacity for its shipping lines
• ATASS Sports uses R to predict the probabilty of wins, draws and losses in the UK Premier League
• BCA is using the Azure ML cloud to deploy R models to production
• Microsoft uses R to heat buildings on campus more efficiently
• eBay uses R to quantify the effect and efficiency of TV, radio and print marketing

… and that's just a selection from the talks that I got to see! With three parallel tracks, there were many great talks that I missed, but you can check out the abstracts (with links to slides to come) at the EARL website.

The next EARL Conference will be held in Boston, November 7-9. The call for presentations is still open, so if you have an interesting story to tell about how R is used at your organization, why not come along?

EARL London 2016: Speakers