Publications by David Smith
New open data sets from Microsoft Research
Microsoft has released a number of data sets produced by Microsoft Research and made them available for download at Microsoft Research Open Data. The Datasets in Microsoft Research Open Data are categorized by their primary research area, such as Physics, Social Science, Environmental Science, and Information Science. Many of the data sets ha...
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Video: R for AI, and the Not Hotdog workshop
Earlier this year at the QCon.ai conference, I gave a short presentation, “The Case for R, for AI developers”. I also presented an interactive workshop, using R and the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, to automatically generate captions for images, and to create a tool to recognize images of hotdogs. Video from both the presentation, and th...
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Highlights from the useR! 2018 conference in Brisbane
he fourteenth annual worldwide R user conference, useR!2018, was held last week in Brisbane, Australia and it was an outstanding success. The conference attracted around 600 users from around the world and — as the first held in the Southern hemisphere — brought many first-time conference-goers to useR!. (There were also a number of beginning...
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A hex sticker wall, created with R
Bill Venables, member of the R Foundation, co-author of the Introduction to R manual, R package developer, and one of the smartest and nicest (a rare combo!) people you will ever meet, received some gifts from the user!2018 conference committee in recognition of his longtime service to the R community. He received a book of reminiscences from tho...
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aRt with code
Looking for something original to decorate your wall? Art With Code, created by Harvard University bioinformatician Jean Fan, provides a collection of R scripts to generate artistic images in the style of famous artworks, for example this randomly-generated piece in the style of Mondrian: Other art generators include “Tunnel” (rotated and s...
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A Certification for R Package Quality
There are more than 12,000 packages for R available on CRAN, and many others available on Github and elsewhere. But how can you be sure that a given R package follows best development practices for high-quality, secure software? Based on a recent survey of R users related to challenges in selecting R packages, the R Consortium now recommends a wa...
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R Generation: 25 Years of R
The August 2018 issue of Significance Magazine includes a retrospective feature on the R language. (I suggest reading the PDF version, also available for free access.) The article by Nick Thieme looks back at the 25 years since the R language was first conceived at Auckland University in 1992. It follows the history of R through the first public ...
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Video: How to run R and Python in SQL Server from a Jupyter notebook
Did you know that you can run R and Python code within a SQL Server instance? Not only does this give you a powerful server to process your data science calculations, but it makes things faster by eliminating the need to move data between client and server. Best of all, you can access this power via your favourite interface on your local machine,...
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IEEE Language Rankings 2018
Python retains its top spot in the fifth annual IEEE Spectrum top programming language rankings, and also gains a designation as an “embedded language”. Data science language R remains the only domain-specific slot in the top 10 (where it as listed as an “enterprise language”) and drops one place compared to its 2017 ranking to take the #...
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In case you missed it: July 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users. A program to validate quality and security for R packages: the Linux Foundation's CII Best Practices Badge Program. R scripts to generate images in the style of famous artworks, like Mondrian's. A 6-minute video tour of the AI and Machine Learning service...
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