Every wanted to make R talk to you? Now you can, with the mscstts package by John Muschelli. It provides an interface to the Microsoft Cognitive Services Text-to-Speech API (hence the name) in Azure, and you can use it to convert any short piece of text to a playable audio ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open 3.5.1 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 3.5.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux from MRAN now. Microsoft R Open is 100% compatible with all R scripts and packages, and works with ... [Read more...]

The latest Redmonk Language Rankings are out. These rankings are published twice a year, and the top three positions in the June 2018 rankings remain unchanged from last time: JavaScript at #1, Java at #2, and Python at #3. The Redmonk rankings are based on Github repositories (as a proxy for developer activity) and ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users. A program to validate quality and security for R packages: the Linux Foundation's CII Best Practices Badge Program. R scripts to generate images in the style of famous artworks, like Mondrian's. A 6-minute ... [Read more...]

Python retains its top spot in the fifth annual IEEE Spectrum top programming language rankings, and also gains a designation as an "embedded language". Data science language R remains the only domain-specific slot in the top 10 (where it as listed as an "enterprise language") and drops one place compared to ... [Read more...]

Did you know that you can run R and Python code within a SQL Server instance? Not only does this give you a powerful server to process your data science calculations, but it makes things faster by eliminating the need to move data between client and server. Best of all, ... [Read more...]

The August 2018 issue of Significance Magazine includes a retrospective feature on the R language. (I suggest reading the PDF version, also available for free access.) The article by Nick Thieme looks back at the 25 years since the R language was first conceived at Auckland University in 1992. It follows the history ... [Read more...]

There are more than 12,000 packages for R available on CRAN, and many others available on Github and elsewhere. But how can you be sure that a given R package follows best development practices for high-quality, secure software? Based on a recent survey of R users related to challenges in selecting ... [Read more...]

Looking for something original to decorate your wall? Art With Code, created by Harvard University bioinformatician Jean Fan, provides a collection of R scripts to generate artistic images in the style of famous artworks, for example this randomly-generated piece in the style of Mondrian: Other art generators include "Tunnel" (rotated ... [Read more...]

Bill Venables, member of the R Foundation, co-author of the Introduction to R manual, R package developer, and one of the smartest and nicest (a rare combo!) people you will ever meet, received some gifts from the user!2018 conference committee in recognition of his longtime service to the R community. ... [Read more...]

he fourteenth annual worldwide R user conference, useR!2018, was held last week in Brisbane, Australia and it was an outstanding success. The conference attracted around 600 users from around the world and — as the first held in the Southern hemisphere — brought many first-time conference-goers to useR!. (There were also a number ... [Read more...]

Earlier this year at the QCon.ai conference, I gave a short presentation, "The Case for R, for AI developers". I also presented an interactive workshop, using R and the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, to automatically generate captions for images, and to create a tool to recognize images of hotdogs. ... [Read more...]

Microsoft has released a number of data sets produced by Microsoft Research and made them available for download at Microsoft Research Open Data. The Datasets in Microsoft Research Open Data are categorized by their primary research area, such as Physics, Social Science, Environmental Science, and Information Science. Many of the ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. An animated visualization of global migration, created in R by Guy Abel. My take on the question, Should you learn R or Python for data science? The BBC and Financial Times use R — ... [Read more...]

Last week the R Core Team released the latest update to the R statistical data analysis environment, R version 3.5.1. This update (codenamed "Feather Spray" — a Peanuts reference) makes no user-visible changes and fixes a few bugs. It is backwards-compatible with R 3.5.0, and users can find updates for Windows, Linux and ... [Read more...]

The animation below, by Shanghai University professor Guy Abel, shows migration within and between regions of the world from 1960 to 2015. The data and the methodology behind the chart is described in this paper. The curved bars around the outside represent the peak migrant flows for each region; globally, migration peaked ... [Read more...]

While graphics guru Edward Tufte recently claimed that "R coders and users just can't do words on graphics and typography" and need additonal tools to make graphics that aren't "clunky", data journalists at major publications beg to differ. The BBC has been creating graphics "purely in R" for some time, ... [Read more...]

R is primarily a language for working with numbers, but we often need to work with text as well. Whether it's formatting text for reports, or analyzing natural language data, R provides a number of facilities for working with character data. Handling Strings with R, a free (CC-BY-NC-SA) e-book by ... [Read more...]

The new PYPL Popularity of Programming Languages (June 2018) index ranks Python at #1 and R at #7. Like the similar TIOBE language index, the PYPL index uses Google search activity to rank language popularity. PYPL, however, fcouses on people searching for tutorials in the respective languages as a proxy for popularity. By ... [Read more...]

Many types of machine learning classifiers, not least commonly-used techniques like ensemble models and neural networks, are notoriously difficult to interpret. If the model produces a surprising label for any given case, it's difficult to answer the question, "why that label, and not one of the others?". One approach to ... [Read more...]