Publications by David Smith
Who wrote that anonymous NYT op-ed? Text similarity analyses with R
In US politics news, the New York Times took the unusual step this week of publishing an anonymous op-ed from a current member of the White House (assumed to be a cabinet member or senior staffer). Speculation about the identity of the author is, of course, rife. Much of the attention has focused on the use of specific words in the article, but c...
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Video: R and Python in in Azure HDInsight
Azure HDInisght was recently updated with version 9.3 of ML Services in HDInsight, which provides integration with R and Python. In particular, it makes it possible to run R and Python within HDInsight's managed Spark instance. The integration provides: R and Python support, with interaction via Visual Studio, VS Code, or RStudio Specialize...
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If not Notebooks, then what? Look to Literate Programming
Author and research engineer Joel Grus kicked off an important conversation about Jupyter Notebooks in his recent presentation at JupyterCon: There's no video yet available of Joel's talk, but you can guess the theme of that opening slide, and walking through the slides conveys the message well, I think. Yuhui Xie, author and creator of the rm...
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How many deaths were caused by the hurricane in Puerto Rico?
President Trump is once again causing distress by downplaying the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico last year. Official estimates initially put the death toll at 15 before raising it to 64 months later, but it was clear even then that those numbers were absurdly low. The government of Puerto Rico commission...
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Not Hotdog: A Shiny app using the Custom Vision API
I had a great time at the EARL Conference in London last week, and as always came away invigorated by all of the applications of R that were presented there. I'll do a full writeup of the conference later this week, but in the meantime I wanted to share the materials from my own presentation there, “Not Hotdog: Image Recognition with R and the ...
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Applications of R presented at EARL London 2018
During the EARL (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) conference in London last week, the organizers asked me how I thought the conference had changed over the years. (This is the conference's fifth year, and I'd been to each one.) My response was that it reflected the increasing maturity of R in the enterprise. The early years featured ma...
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R developer’s guide to Azure
If you want to run R in the cloud, you can of course run it in a virtual machine in the cloud provider of your choice. And you can do that in Azure too. But Azure provides seven dedicated services that provide the ability to run R code, and you can learn all about them in the new R Developer's Guide to Azure at Microsoft Docs. The services includ...
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3-D shadow maps in R: the rayshader package
Data scientists often work with geographic data that needs to be visualized on a map, and sometimes the maps themselves are the data. The data is often located in two-dimensional space (latitude and longitude), but for some applications we have a third dimension as well: elevation. We could represent the elevations using contours, color, or 3-D ...
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XKCD "Curve Fitting", in R
You probably saw this XKCD last week, which brought a grimace of recognition to statisticians everywhere: It's so realistic, that Barry Rowlingson was able to reproduce all but two of the “charts” above with a simple R function (and a little help from the xkcd ggplot2 theme): And now for @revodavid et al, with the xkcd package and font! (st...
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AI, Machine Learning and Data Science Announcements from Microsoft Ignite
Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft's annual developer conference, wrapped up last week and many of the big announcements focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The keynote presentation from Microsoft's Cloud AI lead Eric Boyd showcases the major developments, or you can check out his accompanying blog post for a written summary. In ...
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