Publications by David Smith
Computerworld’s advanced beginner’s guide to R
Many newcomers to R got their start learning the language with Computerworld's Beginner's Guide to R, a 6-part introduction to the basics of the language. Now, budding R users who want to take their skills to the next level have a new guide to help them: Computerword's Advanced Beginner's Guide to R. Written by Sharon Machlis, author of the prior...
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Run compiled R packages in AzureML
We've shown a few times here how you can run R code on data in the cloud with Azure ML Studio, and even how to enable that code as a web service to be called from other applications. But what if you want to run code in a compiled language, like C++? Fortunately, you can take advantage of R's built-in support for compiled code, and call it from a ...
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The history of R’s predecessor, S, from co-creator Rick Becker
Before there was R, there was S. R was modeled on a language developed at AT&T Bell Labs starting in 1976 by Rick Becker and John Chambers (and, later, Alan Wilks) along with Doug Dunn, Jean McRae, and Judy Schilling. At last week's useR! conference, Rick Becker gave a fascinating keynote address, Forty Years of S. His talk recounts the histor...
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In case you missed it: June 2016 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. A preview of the tutorials presented at the useR! 2016 conference. A “advanced beginner's” guide to R published by ComputerWorld includes guides on data wrangling, visualization, and data APIs. Microsoft R Server now runs on Apache Spark, bringing...
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Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
Over the years, we've shared several posts on using the ScaleR package to import, process, visualize and analyze large data sets with R. Until now, you needed to have access to a Microsoft R Server license to take advantage of the package. Now, you can use all of the capabilities of ScaleR free of charge with Microsoft R Client for Windows, whi...
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How R is used at Microsoft
At the useR! conference last month, I was pleased to be able to give a couple of talks about the ways that Microsoft is using and integrating R. In my first talk, Hear, See, Move, I shared how data scientists at Microsoft are working to help the disabled: During the talk I gave some pointers to some of the underlying technology used to build t...
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The trick to understanding NAs (missing values) in R
Here's a little puzzle that might shed some light on some apparently confusing behaviour by missing values (NAs) in R: What is NA^0 in R? You can get the answer easily by typing at the R command line: > NA^0[1] 1 But the interesting question that arises is: why is it 1? Most people might expect that the answer would be NA, like most expressions t...
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An analysis of Pokémon Go types, created with R
As anyone who has tried Pokémon Go recently is probably aware, Pokémon come in different types. A Pokémon's type affects where and when it appears, and the types of attacks it is vulnerable to. Some types, like Normal, Water and Grass are common; others, like Fairy and Dragon are rare. Many Pokémon have two or more types. To get a sense of...
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Introducing the Microsoft Data Science Summit, Sep 26-27
Microsoft has a brand-new conference, exclusively for data scientists, big data engineers, and machine learning practitioners. The Microsoft Data Science Summit, to be held in Atlanta GA, September 26-27, will feature talks and lab sessions from Microsoft engineers and thought leaders on using data science techniques and Microsoft technology, app...
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Microsoft R Open 3.3.0 now available
Microsoft R Open 3.3.0, the enhanced distribution of open source R, is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux systems. This release includes a significant updates to the R language engine from the R Core Group bundled with the multithreaded performance and CRAN package time-machine capabilities of Microsoft R Open. The core perf...
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