Articles by David Smith

Copilot for R

March 6, 2023 | David Smith

It was my great pleasure to present last week to the NYC Data Hackers on the topic of Copilot for R. If you haven't come across Copilot before, it's like an AI-based pair programmer that suggests new lines of code, and perhaps entire functions, based on context. In the presentation (... [Read more...]

MRAN Time Machine will be retired on July 1

January 10, 2023 | David Smith

On July 1 2023, the MRAN website and the CRAN snapshot archive hosted therein will be retired, Microsoft announced last week. One purpose of MRAN was to distribute Microsoft R Open, which was discontinued in 2021. MRAN has also served since 2014 as the repository of a daily archive of CRAN packages. Some R ... [Read more...]

Easy R Tutorials with Dev Containers

August 2, 2022 | David Smith

Ever written a tutorial for R — or simply shared some R code with someone — and been told that your code doesn't work on their machine? There's now an easy way to solve that problem: Dev Containers. Dev Containers are a standardized container format designed for interactive use. You can set ... [Read more...]

Azure Functions with R and plumber

December 17, 2020 | David Smith

Azure Functions is a cloud service that allows you to deploy “serverless” microservices that are triggered by events (timers, HTTP POST events, etc) and automatically scale to serve demand while minimizing latency. The service natively supports functions written in C#, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, Python and TypeScript, and now supports other ...
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R at Microsoft

December 11, 2020 | David Smith

I was my great pleasure yesterday to be a presenter in the "Why R Webinar" series, on the topic R at Microsoft. In the talk (which you can watch below) I recounted the history of Microsoft's acquisition of Revolution Analytics, and the various way the Microsoft supports R: its membership ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open 4.0.2 now available

September 23, 2020 | David Smith

Microsoft R Open 4.0.2 has been released, combining the latest R language engine with multi-processor performance and tools for managing R packages reproducibly. You can download Microsoft R Open 4.0.2 for Windows,and Linux from MRAN now. Microsoft R Open is 100% compatible with all R version 4 scripts and packages, and works with ... [Read more...]

MLOPS with R and GitHub Actions

August 25, 2020 | David Smith

With thanks to the kind folks at Lander Analytics, video from my New York R Conference talk earlier this month is now available to view. The slides are also available for download in PDF format. In my talk, I described how I automated the deployment of a Shiny app using ...
[Read more...]

The History of R (updated for 2020)

July 27, 2020 | David Smith

As an update to this post, here's a list of the major events in R history since its creation: 1992: R development begins as a research project in Auckland, NZ by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka 1993: First binary versions of R published at Statlib 1995: R first distributed as open-source software, under ... [Read more...]

R 4.0.2 now available

June 25, 2020 | David Smith

R 4.0.2 is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. This update addresses a few minor bugs included in the R 4.0.0 release, and also a significant bug introduced in R 4.0.1 on the Windows platform. Compared to R 4.0.0, the R 4.0.2 update also improves the performance of the merge function, ... [Read more...]

R 4.0.2 now available

June 25, 2020 | David Smith

R 4.0.2 is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. This update addresses a few minor bugs included in the R 4.0.0 release, and also a significant bug introduced in R 4.0.1 on the Windows platform. Compared to R 4.0.0, the R 4.0.2 update also improves the performance of the merge function, ... [Read more...]

R 4.0.0 now available, and a look back at R’s history

April 27, 2020 | David Smith

R 4.0.0 was released in source form on Friday, and binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux are available for download now. As the version number bump suggests, this is a major update to R that makes some significant changes. Some of these changes — particularly the first one listed below — are likely ...
[Read more...]

Forecasting Best Practices, from Microsoft

April 14, 2020 | David Smith

Microsoft has released a GitHub repository to share best practices for time series forecasting. From the repo: Time series forecasting is one of the most important topics in data science. Almost every business needs to predict the future in order to make better decisions and allocate resources more effectively. This ...
[Read more...]

R 3.6.3 is available, marking the 20th anniversary of R 1.0.0

March 10, 2020 | David Smith

On February 29, R 3.6.3 was released and is now available for Windows, Linux and Mac systems. This update, codenamed "Holding the Windsock", fixes a few minor bugs, and as a minor update maintains compatibility with scripts and packages written for prior versions of R 3.6. February 29 is an auspicious date, because that ...
[Read more...]

MLOPS for R with Azure Machine Learning

February 26, 2020 | David Smith

The video recording of my RStudio::conf talk, MLOPS for R with Azure Machine Learning, is now available for streaming thanks to the fine folks at RStudio. The talk begins with a general discussion of MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) and how it differs from DevOps as applied to traditional (non-ML-based) ...
[Read more...]

R 3.6.2 is out, and a preview of R 4.0.0

December 13, 2019 | David Smith

R 3.6.2, the latest update to the R language, is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux. As a minor release, R 3.6.2 makes only small improvements to R, including some new options for dot charts and better handling of missing values when using running medians as a smoother on ...
[Read more...]

R 3.6.2 is out, and a preview of R 4.0.0

December 13, 2019 | David Smith

R 3.6.2, the latest update to the R language, is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux. As a minor release, R 3.6.2 makes only small improvements to R, including some new options for dot charts and better handling of missing values when using running medians as a smoother on ...
[Read more...]

Azure AI and Machine Learning talk series

November 12, 2019 | David Smith

At last week's Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, our team delivered a series of 6 talks about AI and machine learning applications with Azure. The videos from each talk are linked below, and you can watch every talk from the conference online (no registration necessary). Each of our talks also comes ...
[Read more...]

New R Support in Azure Machine Learning

November 7, 2019 | David Smith

Azure Machine Learning has added support for the R language, it was announced at the Ignite conference in Orlando this week. A new R package azuremlsdk (available to install from Github now, and from CRAN soon), provides the interface to the Azure Machine Learning service. With R functions, you can ... [Read more...]

A DevOps Process for Deploying R to Production

September 12, 2019 | David Smith

I've been at the EARL Conference in London this week, and as always it's been inspiring to see so many examples of R being used in production at companies like Sainsbury's, BMW, Austria Post, PartnerRe, Royal Free Hospital, the BBC, the Financial Times, and many others. My own talk, A ... [Read more...]
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