Preview of EARL London 2017

The next event in the Effective Applications of the R Language (EARL) conference series takes place next week, with EARL London 2017. The EARL conference series got its start in London, and the London event remains the biggest and brightest of the venues. This year's program is no exception, with an impressive raft of tutorials and keynote speakers, and three full tracks of contributed talks focusing on real-world applications of R. Here are a few highlights you might want to check out.

From the Monday tutorial sessions, Jenny Bryan's session on Writing R Functions for Fun and Profit promises to be a great session for budding R programmers looking to take their R skills to the next level. If you'd like to learn how to use Microsoft R to implement AI systems with machine learning models, check out the Working with the MicrosoftML Package session presented by my colleague, Ali Zaidi. And if you wanted to try the Introduction to Shiny session you'd better have registered already: it's sold out!

I'm looking forward to all of the keynote sessions. Tom Smith from the Office of National Statistics will surely have some interesting insights on the UK Government's use of R. Hilary Parker tells an amazing story about opinionated development from her experiences as a data scientist at Etsy and StitchFix. And the aforementioned Jenny Bryan's presentations are always full of useful advice and delightful visuals. There will also be community updates from the R Consortium and R Ladies.

It's the contributed sessions that are always tricky for me — it's always so hard to choose between the parallel sessions! Here are some talks I've marked in my program:

• Derek Norton & Neera Talbert, Microsoft: SAS to R: How to, and is it enough?
• Dr Joy McKenny, Northumbrian Water: Using R to monitor sewer network performance for the water industry.
• Maxime Burlot, Bank of France: Application of predictive analysis to firms performance dynamics.
• James Lawrence, The Behavioural Insights Team: Reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries.
• Daniel Dalevi, AstraZeneca: Saving Millions using R and Shiny in Pharma.
• Simon Field, Microsoft: How to develop data scientist super powers.
• Chris Chapman, Google. Choice models for product optimization and pricing.
• Ashley Turner, Transport for London. Using R at TfL.
• Dr Dan Carpenter, Thames Valley Environmental Records Centre: Bat alert map: predicting bat roost presence using R.
• Dr Sarah Pollicott, Capital One: The dataCompareR package.

I'll be giving a talk as well: Reproducible Data Science with R. I hope to see you in London next week. If you haven't registered yet, last-minute tickets for EARL London 2017 are available from the EARL website.

EARL: London 2017