Publications by David Smith
R 3.4.1 "Single Candle" released
The R core team announced today the release of R 3.4.1 (codename: Single Candle). This release fixes a few minor bugs reported after the release of R 3.4.0, including an issue sometimes encountered when attempting to install packages on Windows, and problems displaying functions including Unicode characters (like “日本語”) in the Windows ...
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UseR! 2017 live-stream starts July 5
The useR!2017 conference, the annual meeting of R users worldwide and the largest to date, is sold completely sold out. But for those that couldn't make it to Brussels, Microsoft will be live-streaming the conference at aka.ms/useRConference-live. Bookmark that page and follow along during the conference starting with the opening of the main pro...
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More Companies using R
Here's a quick roundup of some case studies published recently on the Microsoft Customer Stories portal, with examples of companies running R in production environments using the Microsoft stack. eToro, the social trading network, uses Microsoft R Server and Azure Machine Learning so that investors can automatically duplicate market strategies a...
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How perceptions of R have changed
In the sponsor presentation for Microsoft at the useR!2017 conference in Brussels this morning, I thought I'd share how perceptions of R have changed over the years. Today, R known as is popular, comprehensive, accepted, scalable, production-ready and supported software environment for data analysis, but that wasn't always the case. You can find ...
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In case you missed it: June 2017 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. R 3.4.1 “Single Candle” has been released. The Scientific Computing Coordinator at the FDA explains how R is used at the FDA and by sponsors for clinical trial submissions. Several useful tips related to including images in Rmarkdown documents. A revi...
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Take the R Consortium survey on R
Since its foundation just a little over two years ago, the R Consortium has been dedicated to providing support to the R Project and the R community. Already, the R Consortium has channeled the contributions from its corporate members to fund more than 25 projects, working groups, and community initiatives. Recently funded initiatives include a...
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20 years of CRAN
The presentations and tutorials are starting to become available at the Channel 9 useR!2017 page. There's a wealth of amazing content to explore there already, and I wanted to call out one presentation in particular: Uwe Ligges' keynote presentation, 20 years of CRAN. There are many reasons for the success of R: the language itself, the mathemati...
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R in Minecraft: the lightning talk
My lightning talk at the useR!2017 conference was R in Minecraft: a five-minute tour of the miner and craft packages and associated book designed to teach kids how to use the R language while manipulating the world of Minecraft. You can see my talk below (starting at the 10:40 mark), and the slides (mostly created in Minecraft) are available for ...
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Revisiting the useR!2017 conference: Recordings now available
The annual useR!2017 conference took place July 4-7 in Brussels, and in every dimension it was the best yet. It was the largest (with over 1,100 R users from around the world in attendance), and yet still very smoothly run with many amazing talks and lots of fun for everyone. If you weren't able to make it to Brussels, take a look at these recaps...
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Securely store API keys in R scripts with the "secret" package
If you use an API key to access a secure service, or need to use a password to access a protected database, you'll need to provide these “secrets” in your R code somewhere. That's easy to do if you just include those keys as strings in your code — but it's not very secure. This means your private keys and passwords are stored in plain-text ...
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