Publications by David Smith
Mini-Hackathon in Philadelphia, tonight!
If you're in the Philadelphia area and want to hack on some data with other R users this evening, come to the IntegriChain/Revolution Analytics Meetup at Drexel University. There will be an short lecture to introduce the problem, followed by a hacking session (virtual machines with Revolution R software and data will be provided). And of course...
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Design the T-shirt for useR! 2014
The official T-shirt for the useR! 2014 R user conference (to be held June 30 – July 3 at UCLA) will be the result of open source contributions and reproducible research. The organizers of the conference are soliciting designs for the official T-shirt — but there's a catch. The image on the front of the T-shirt will be created entirely with R...
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Microsoft uses R for Xbox matchmaking
If you've ever played online multiplayer games like Halo on the Xbox console, you'll know that being matched up with the right teammates and opponents is a critical part of the experience. Getting matched with an opponent that's way above your skill level isn't just demoralizing for you; it's also a waste of time for them (you generally don't adv...
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Benchmarking results compare speed of Revolution R Enterprise and legacy SAS
Many companies are considering switching from SAS to R for statistical data analysis, and may be wondering how R compares in performance and data size scalability to the legacy SAS systems (base SAS and SAS/Stat) they are currently using. Performance and scalability for R is exactly what Revolution R Enterprise (RRE) was designed for. In a recen...
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hipsteR: Learn what you missed in R as an early adopter
If you learned R in its early days (say, the early 2000's or even the late 1990's) you may still be using some — ahem — old-fashioned ways to accomplish some tasks better served by newer functions and packages. To help those of us who have may missed some of R's more recent innovations, Karl Broman created hipsteR, a guide for “re-educatin...
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useR! 2014 conference update
The useR! 2014 conference promises to be the biggest yet, with more than 500 registrations already. But there's room for plenty more R users! Check out the update from the organizing committer below, and if you haven't already done so, register for the conference at the useR! 2014 website. We are exactly one month away from the useR! 2014 confer...
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A million new R users
Check out this tweet: Just found out that @rdpeng @jtleek @bcaffo have enrolled 1,000,000 students in statistics classes on @coursera in last 2 years. — Simply Statistics (@simplystats) May 30, 2014 Those courses include Roger Peng's Computing for Data Analysis and Jeff Leek's “Data Analysis“, and they all use the R language. That means mo...
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Reflections on the China R User Conference
It was a great honour to be able to present to the China R Users Conference in Beijing last month, and share various applications of R that I've encountered recently. I was really invigorated by the enthusiasm of the many R users at the conference, and everyone was very warm and friendly. Here's a photo I took from the stage, so you can see how ...
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On the relevance of open source analytics
“A growing body of evidence that indicates that the most meaningful way to access predictive analytics and enhance the reputation of Data Science is through open source analytics, which greatly hinges upon the free open source programming language R”, according to Dataversity in the recent article “The Relevance of Open Source (Advanced) An...
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In case you missed it: May 2014 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from May of particular interest to R users: Karl Broman's hipsteR guide lists some new(ish) features of R that early adopters may have missed. Joseph Rickert reviews the R/Finance 2014 conference and summarizes the R packages presented there. Plus, a review of R's impact on computational financ...
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