Publications by David Smith
Mathematical art in R
Who says there's no art in mathematics? I've long admired the generative art that Thomas Lin Peterson occasionally posts (and that you can see on Instagram), and though he's a prolific R user I'm not quite sure how he makes his art. Marcus Volz has another beautiful portfolio of generative art, and has also created an R package you can use to cre...
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Not Hotdog: An R image classification application, using the Custom Vision API
If you’re a fan of the HBO show Silicon Valley, you probably remember the episode where Jian Yang creates an application to identify food using a smartphone phone camera: Surprisingly, the app in that scene isn’t just a pre-recorded special effect: the producers actually developed a smartphone application using Tensorflow (and you can even d...
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A few podcast recommendations
After avoiding the entire medium for years, I've been rather getting into listening to podcasts lately. As a worker-from-home I don't have a commute (the natural use case of podcasts, I guess), but I have been travelling a lot more recently and it's been great to listen to during long flights. It turns out there are a lot of great podcasts out th...
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Statistics from R-bloggers
Tal Galili's R-bloggers.com has been syndicating blog posts about R for quite a while — from memory I'd say about 8 years, but I couldn't find the exact date it started aggregating. Anyway, it contains a wealth of information about activity in the R ecosystem, but without any easy way to access that information other than the blog post feed. Bo...
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The case for R, for AI developers
I had a great time this week at the Qcon.ai conference in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of presenting to an audience of mostly Java and Python developers. It's unfortunate that videos won't be available for a while, because there were some amazing presentations: those by Matt Ranney, Mike Williams and Rachel Thomas were particular sta...
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News from the R Consortium
The R Consortium has been quite busy lately, so I thought I'd take a moment to bring you up to speed on some recent news. (Disclosure: Microsoft is a member of the R Consortium, and I am a member of its board of directors.) Many R Consortium funded projects are underway. The “Quantities for R” project has released its first working prototyp...
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Uber overtakes taxis in New York City
In an update to his analysis of taxi and ride-share trips, Todd Schnieder reports that the number of daily Uber rides exceeds the number of taxi rides in New York City, as of November 2017. The data is provided by the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, and the analysis and graphics were created using the open-source R language. (The code an...
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Big changes behind the scenes in R 3.5.0
A major update to R is now available. The R Core group has announced the release of R 3.5.0, and binary versions for Windows and Linux are now available from the primary CRAN mirror. (The Mac release is forthcoming.) Probably the biggest change in R 3.5.0 will be invisible to most users — except by the performance improvements it brings. The A...
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A maze-solving Minecraft robot, in R
Last week at the New York R Conference, I gave a presentation on using R in Minecraft. (I've embedded the slides below.) The demo gods were not kind to me, and while I was able to show building a randomly-generated maze in the Minecraft world, my attempt to have the player solve it automatically was stymied by some server issues. In this blog pos...
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Make a sculpture in LEGO from a photo, with R
The entrance to our office in Redmond in is adorned with this sculpture of our department logo, rendered in LEGO: We had fun with LEGO bricks at work this week. APEX is our internal team name, this was fun. Oh and we're hiring for all roles in Azure! pic.twitter.com/VlNNaTexA5 — Jeff Sandquist (@jeffsand) March 30, 2017 Our team, the Cloud Dev...
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