Publications by David Smith
Microsoft R Open 3.4.4 now available
An update to Microsoft R Open (MRO) is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux. This release upgrades the R language engine to version 3.4.4, which addresses some minor issues with timezone detection and some edge cases in some statistics functions. As a maintenance release, it's backwards-compatible with scripts and packages from t...
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Three Twitter Threads
I've been heads-down this week preparing for some upcoming talks, so not as much blogging as usual this week. But there have been some interesting conversations on Twitter this week that you may be interested to check out if you're not on the platform. Steph Lock shares her go-to R packages for every stage of the data science process: My #rstats...
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Open-Source Machine Learning in Azure
The topic for my talk at the Microsoft Build conference yesterday was “Migrating Existing Open Source Machine Learning to Azure”. The idea behind the talk was to show how you can take the open-source tools and workflows you already use for machine learning and data science, and easily transition them to the Azure cloud to take advantage of it...
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In case you missed it: April 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. Microsoft R Open 3.4.4, based on R 3.4.4, is now available. An R script by Ryan Timpe converts a photo into instructions for rendering it as LEGO bricks. R functions to build a random maze in Minecraft, and have your avatar solve the maze automatically. ...
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Custom R charts coming to Excel
This week at the BUILD conference, Microsoft announced that Power BI custom visuals will soon be available as charts with Excel. You'll be able to choose a range of data within an Excel workbook, and pass those data to one of the built-in Power BI custom visuals, or one you've created yourself using the API. Since you can create Power BI custom ...
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Video: speeding up R with parallel programming in the cloud
I had a great time in Budapest last week for the eRum 2018 conference. The organizers have already made all of the videos available online. Here's my presentation: Speeding up R with Parallel Programming in the cloud. You can find (and download) my presentation slides here. And if you just want the references from the last slide, here are the li...
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Reflections on the ROpenSci Unconference
I had an amazing time this week participating in the 2018 ROpenSci Unconference, the sixth annual ROpenSci hackathon bringing together people to advance the tools and community for scientific computing with R. It was so inspiring to be among such a talented and dedicated group of people — special kudos goes to the organizing committee for cur...
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New round of R Consortium grants announced
The R Consortium has just announced its latest round of project grants. After reviewing the proposals submitted by the R community, the Infrastructure Steering Committee has elected to fund the following projects for the Spring 2018 season: Further updates to the DBI package, to provide a consistent interface between R and databases Updating the...
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StatCheck the Game
If you don't get enough joy from publishing scientific papers in your day job, or simply want to experience what it's like to be in a publish-or-perish environment where the P-value is the only important part of a paper, you might want to try StatCheck: the board game where the object is to publish two papers before any of your opponents. As the...
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In case you missed it: May 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. The R Consortium has announced a new round of grants for projects proposed by the R community. A look back at the ROpenSci unconference held in Seattle. Video of my European R Users Meeting talk, “Speeding up R with Parallel Programming in the Cloud�...
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