Publications by David Smith
The AI Show: Data Science Virtual Machine
The Data Science Virtual Machine was featured on a recent episode of the AI Show with Seth Juarez and Gopi Kumar. If you want a quick and easy way to spin up a virtual machine with all of the data science tools you'll ever need — including R and RStudio — already installed and ready to go, this video explains what the Data Science Virtual M...
979 sym
In case you missed it: January 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users. Josh Katz and Peter Aldhous used R to analyze the content and presentation of the most recent State of the Union speech from the US president. Slides for my presentation “Speeding up R with Parallel Processing in the Cloud”, with applications of th...
2271 sym
Diversity scholarships for upcoming R conferences
One of the greatest things about the R community is its diversity. This is largely thanks to organizations like Forwards and R-Ladies, who have been instrumental in welcoming women and other under-represented groups to the world of R. Likewise, conferences in the R community encourage diversity, with open codes of conduct, facilitations like on-s...
1951 sym
What does Microsoft do with R?
I was genuinely chuffed to get a shout-out in the most recent episode of Not So Standard Deviations, the awesome statistics-and-R themed podcast hosted by Hilary Parker and Roger Peng. In that episode, Roger recounts his recent discovery of the Microsoft ecosystem of tools for R, which he (jokingly) dubbed the “Microsoft-verse”. While we're f...
5875 sym
A fresh look for base graphics
While ggplot2 (and its various extensions) is often the go-to package for graphics in R these days, if you need to step outside the boundaries of what ggplot2 can do, you can always step back to base R graphics (and the built-in lattice package) and customize to your hearts content. The problem is that (unlike for ggplot2) the default look for ...
1208 sym 4 img
Machine Learning in R with TensorFlow
Modern machine learning platforms like Tensorflow have to date been used mainly by the computer science crowd, for applications like computer vision and language understanding. But as JJ Allaire pointed out in his keynote at the RStudio conference earlier this month (embedded below), there's a wealth of applications in the data science domain tha...
1959 sym
Analyzing accelerometer data with R
Using your smartphone (any modern phone with a built-in accelerometer should work), visit the Cast Your Spell page created by Nick Strayer. (If you need to type it to your phone browser directly, here's a shortlink: bit.ly/castspell .) Scroll down and click the “Press To Cast!” button, and then wave your phone like a wand using one of the sha...
1719 sym 6 img
How to set up a sparklyr cluster in 5 minutes
If you've ever wanted to play around with big data sets in a Spark cluster from R with the sparklyr package, but haven't gotten started because setting up a Spark cluster is too hard, well … rest easy. You can get up and running in about 5 minutes using the guide SparklyR on Azure with AZTK, and you don't even have to install anything yourself...
5522 sym R (140 sym/3 pcs) 6 img
New releases: Microsoft R Client 3.4.3, Microsoft ML Server 9.3
An update to Microsoft R Client, Microsoft's distribution of open source R with additional proprietary packages — including RevoScaleR (for data analysis at scale) and MicrosoftML (for machine learning) — is now available. Microsoft R Client 3.4.3 updates the R engine to R 3.4.3, and (on Linux) now supports deploying computations to a remote ...
1491 sym
The R Consortium has funded half a million dollars to R projects
The R Consortium passed a significant milestone this month: since its inception, the non-profit body has provided more than US$500,000 in grant funding to project proposed by the R Community. The R Consortium uses the dues from its member organizations to fund grant proposals, which are reviewed twice a year by its Infrastructure Steering Committ...
1541 sym