EARL London 2019 Conference Recap

I had an awesome time at the Enterprise Applications of the R Language (EARL) Conference held in London in September, 2019. EARL reminded me that it is good to keep showing up at conferences. I entered and the first thing I heard was organisers at the table welcoming me “Damian is that you? Awesome to see you again!” Feels great to be a part of the amazing R community. Within minutes I already met a couple of people. I like the vibe at EARLs. I ran into some of the people from other conferences who remembered me from Insurance Data Science in Zurich and EARL 2018 in Seattle. 

What a fantastic view from the #earlconf venue! pic.twitter.com/jtIS3y6ETX

— Damian Rodziewicz (@D_Rodziewicz) September 11, 2019

At EARL 2018 in Seattle I presented about analyzing satellite imagery with deep learning networks, but this time I was a pure attendee, which was a different sort of intense and fantastic. The conference kicked off with a keynote by Julia Silge, the Jane Austen loving astrophysicist and author of “Text Mining with R.”. Julia shared very interesting insights about Data Scientists all over the world that were gathered in a huge Stack Overflow poll.

% of ⁦@StackOverflow⁩ questions by technology presented by ⁦@juliasilge⁩ #earlconf @appsilon pic.twitter.com/6c6tz98es2

— Damian Rodziewicz (@D_Rodziewicz) September 11, 2019

I have worked on 50 something Shiny dashboard applications, but I always learn something new at conferences. Christel Swift had an interesting presentation about using shiny at BBC. I also learned quite a few tricks during the workshop about R Markdown and Interactive Dashboards that took place the day before the conference.

Useful and practical talk by Christel Swift from BBC about building insights and sharing them through a shiny app! #earlconf pic.twitter.com/IaKq0FeQd0

— Damian Rodziewicz (@D_Rodziewicz) September 11, 2019

I didn’t know that it took 15 years to develop a new drug. I heard a fascinating presentation by Bayer about where data science meets the world of pharmaceuticals. The topic is close to us as we also face many challenges when working with data in the pharma industry.  

It takes 15 years to develop a new medicine! Data Science helps Bayer tremendously throughout the process #earlconf @appsilon pic.twitter.com/mTxwlpbFvW

— Damian Rodziewicz (@D_Rodziewicz) September 11, 2019

I thought this slide was hilarious: 

Perfect image to explain regression testing ???? #earlconf ⁦@appsilon⁩ pic.twitter.com/wdKPc9PHth

— Damian Rodziewicz (@D_Rodziewicz) September 11, 2019

At the conference you could also learn how Transport for London (TFL) uses Data Science to reduce station overcrowding and closures – take a look at Mark Samuels blog post about the presentation – https://diginomica.com/how-tfl-using-data-science-reduce-station-overcrowding-and-closures.

Before/between/after the presentations I had so many fascinating conversations, some of which continued into the wee hours. I think everyone, even competitors, recognized that there was so much to gain from sharing information and bouncing ideas off of each other. 

Many people I met were just starting with R and introducing R in their companies. I heard a lot of questions about using R in production – our pitch about big pharma that introduced R with our support fit perfectly there. 

Note to self: pick up a Catch Box for when we host a conference. You can throw it at people instead of awkwardly leaning over crowds of people trying to hand them the microphone. It was entertaining each time they tossed the Catch Box at an audience member.    

Thank you @MangoTheCat for organizing #earlconf! Worth noting that audio and logistics were perfect. Also, the microphone that you can throw at people is I think a dream of every presenter – awesome idea @rstudio! #rstats @appsilon pic.twitter.com/qz3XILhidJ

— Damian Rodziewicz (@D_Rodziewicz) September 12, 2019

EARL was exciting and well organized. I got to know the Mango Solutions founders, a lot of RStudio folks and plenty of different Data Scientists from various companies. EARL is the conference that you don’t want to miss.

We are in the middle of the WhyR Warsaw conference at the moment. We’re so excited to host Dr. Kenneth Benoit from the London School of Economics and creator of the quanteda R package. I will co-present with him on the topic of Natural Language Processing for non-programmers. But that is a post for another time! Thanks for stopping by. Questions? Comments? You can find me on Twitter @D_Rodziewicz.

Article EARL London 2019 Conference Recap comes from Appsilon Data Science | End­ to­ End Data Science Solutions.