Publications by David Smith
R at Microsoft
I was honoured to be the presenter at last night’s meeting of SURF, the 11th largest R user group worldwide. The topic of my presentation was “R at Microsoft”, where I described how Microsoft has enthusiastically embraced R for internal use (such as for Azure capacity planning, and Xbox gaming improvements), and as a feature of its data pla...
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Generalized Linear Mixed Models: the FAQ
Mixed models (which include random effects, essentially parameters drawn from a random distribution) are tricky beasts. Throw non-Normal distributions into the mix for Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs), or go non-linear, and things get trickier still. It was a new field of Statistics when I was working on the Oswald package for S-PLUS, and...
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Announcing the R Consortium
The R community has grown explosively over the past few years, both in terms of the number of R users and the number of companies who rely on R as their data science platform. To serve the needs of this rapidly growing community, and to continue the success of the R Project as a whole, representatives from the R Foundation and from industry have...
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useR 2015: it’s a wrap!
The latest worldwide R user conference has just wrapped up in Aalborg, Denmark and useR! 2015 was the best yet. A hearty round of applause to the organizers for a smoothly run, informative and fun event. To the organizers of next year's event in the Stanford, California: the bar has been raised. As I was chatting to various participants, the same...
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R Consortium News Roundup
In case you missed the news last week, the R Consortium was announced. This new non-profit trade group will work with the R Foundation to support the R Community and the R Project generally. As you might expect, the announcement generated quite a bit of news in the press. Here are links to some of the coverage: Venturebeat: Microsoft, Oracle, H...
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In case you missed it: June 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. The R Consortium, a trade group dedicated to the support and growth of the R Community, has launched with the R Foundation, Microsoft, RStudio and others as founding members. A detailed FAQ for fitting Generalized Linear Models in R. My presentation on ...
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Using R to analyze pro motorcycle racing
EMC recently ran a competion to find out why John McGuinness, the legendary motorcycle racer known as the “Morecambe Missile”, is outperforms the average motorcycle racer. To answer this question, EMC instrumented his bike and his suit with a number of real-time sensors. (Data collected included gear and RPM for the bike, and heart rate and...
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Planning of and some stats from useR! 2015, Aalborg
By Torben Tvedebrink, Chair of local committee, useR! 2015 Planning After useR! 2015 in Aalborg I had some time to reflect and think back on the phase leading up to the actual conference. The story of useR! 2015 began in 2013 when Søren Højsgaard, Head of Department of Mathematical Sciences, Aalborg University, popped the idea of hosting useR! ...
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KDD Cup 2015 winners announced
The KDD Cup is an annual competition to build the best predictive model from a large data set. This years' contest tasked entrants to predict the likelihood of a student dropping out from one of XuetangX's massively-online open courses, based on the student's prior activities. The competition closed on July 12, and yesterday, the winning teams w...
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Revolution R Open 3.2.1 now available
The latest update to Revolution R Open, RRO 3.2.1, is now available for download from MRAN. This release upgrades to the latest R engine (3.2.1), enables package downloads via HTTPS by default, and adds new supported Linux platforms. Revolution R Open 3.2.1 includes: The latest R engine, R 3.2.1. Improvements in this release include more fle...
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