Kolkata R User Group: A Rich History with Statistics 

The R Consortium recently spoke with Samrit Pramanik of the Kolkata R User Group about his experience starting a new R User Group in India. Samrit highlighted Kolkata’s rich history with statistics and talked about the diverse local R community.

The Kolkata R User group is organizing its second online event titled “A New Approach for Teaching Data Analytics with R” on July 13th. R users from around the world are invited to join this event.

Please share your background and involvement with the RUGS group.

My name is Samrit Pramanik. I work as a data scientist at a US-based private firm and have a post-graduate degree in statistics from the University of Calcutta. I have been using R since my post-graduate days in 2018 and used it extensively in various projects during my studies. Since 2022, I have also been an R instructor for a non-profit organization. Additionally, I have been involved in several short projects working with R. Since April 2024, I have managed the Kolkata R User group.

This is the third city-based R user group in India that is affiliated with the R Consortium. I plan to arrange virtual meetups monthly and in-person meetups annually. I enjoy helping and teaching people from diverse backgrounds, not only in statistics, mathematics, and data science but also in other areas. I want to teach them to use R language to add value to their professional and personal projects.

Can you share what the R community is like in Kolkata? 

The Kolkata User Group has been formed with a broader perspective that I would like to share with you. Kolkata is known for its reputation in statistical research and education. The city is recognized as the birthplace of modern statistics in India, with the establishment of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1931 by a prominent figure in statistics. The University of Calcutta, where I graduated, was the first in Asia to offer a post-graduate degree in statistics in 1941. This rich history made the formation of the Kolkata R User Group inevitable. Our community consists of academics and professionals from diverse fields such as life sciences, healthcare, the public sector, physics, astrophysics, and other industries. This diverse background facilitates robust exchanges of ideas and techniques related to R and data, making our R community in Kolkata truly unique.

Please tell us about your recent and upcoming events?

I would like to highlight a recent event. Last month, in June, we had our inaugural session where we introduced Quarto, a recently released reporting tool by Posit. Our goal was to make the participants aware of this tool and its outstanding features, such as website building, ebook writing, creating thesis papers, manuscripts, and blogging sites. We aimed to show participants, including early graduate students, professionals in the industry, and researchers from academia, that they can use Quarto in their projects and studies for reporting. This was our first organized session.

The upcoming session is scheduled for July 13th. It will focus on a new approach to teaching R to students with non-technical backgrounds such as business students. Dr. Abhimanyu Gupta from Saint Louis University will be the speaker at this event.

We have received very positive feedback and responses from the participants who are showing interest in the upcoming events. They want us to organize such events frequently. People are very much aware of these events and this community. They are very responsive, and we have received positive responses. Two esteemed Economics professors have expressed interest in joining our organizing team and working with us.

Please share about a project you are currently working on or have worked on in the past using the R language. Goal/reason, result, anything interesting, especially related to the industry you work in?

Currently, I am working on two projects. The first project involves cricket analytics, where I extensively use R for cleaning up messy raw data and conducting exploratory data analysis at both the team and individual player levels and published a shiny dashboard on performance analysis of T20I players. I’m also building a statistical model to predict the total score of an innings, the winner of the match, and the tournament. Lastly, I aim to compile all the findings into an ebook format.

 Cricket Performance Analysis Shiny Dashboard

The second project revolves around converting the functions and features of AstroPy, an open source software package for astronomy and astrophysics, into R. Our goal is to enhance its popularity among researchers and scientists in the astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology domains. I am collaborating with another individual from a physics background on this open source project, and we plan to publish it on GitHub soon for public access.

How do I Join?

R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups organize, share information, and support each other worldwide. We have given grants over the past four years, encompassing over 68,000 members in 33 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute.

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