Publications by David Smith
In case you missed it: November 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. David Gerard assesses the plausibility of a key plot point in 'Jurassic Park' with simulations in R. In-database R is available in Azure SQL Database for private preview. Introducing AzureR, a new suite of R packages for managing Azure resources in ...
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R 3.5.2 now available
R 3.5.2, the latest version of the R language for statistical computation and graphics from the R Foundation, was released today. (This release is codenamed “Eggshell Igloo”, likely in reference to this or this Peanuts cartoon.) Compared to R 3.5.1, this update includes only bug fixes, so R scripts and packages compatible with R 3.5.0 or R 3....
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Notebooks from the Practical AI Workshop
Last month, I delivered the one-day workshop Practical AI for the Working Software Engineer at the Artificial Intelligence Live conference in Orlando. As the title suggests, the workshop was aimed at developers, bu I didn't assume any particular programming language background. In addition to the lecture slides, the workshop was delivered as a se...
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In case you missed it: December 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users. R 3.5.2 is now available. Roundup of AI, Machine Learning and Data Science news from December 2018. AzureStor, a new R package to interface with Azure Storage. How to use the “plumber” package to create an R service as a container with the AzureCo...
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AzureR packages now on CRAN
The suite of AzureR packages for interfacing with Azure services from R is now available on CRAN. If you missed the earlier announcements, this means you can now use the install.packages function in R to install these packages, rather than having to install from the Github repositories. Updated versions of these packages will also be posted to CR...
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Who is the greatest finisher in soccer?
It's relatively easy to find the player who has scored the most goals in the last 12 years (hello, Lionel Messi). But which professional football (soccer) player is the best finisher, i.e. which player is most likely to put a shot they take into the goal? You can't simply use the conversion rate (the ratio of shots taken to goals scored), because...
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Use foreach with HPC schedulers thanks to the future package
The future package is a powerful and elegant cross-platform framework for orchestrating asynchronous computations in R. It's ideal for working with computations that take a long time to complete; that would benefit from using distributed, parallel frameworks to make them complete faster; and that you'd rather not have locking up your interactive...
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AI, Machine Learning and Data Science Roundup: January 2019
A monthly roundup of news about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science. This is an eclectic collection of interesting blog posts, software announcements and data applications from Microsoft and elsewhere that I've noted over the past month or so. Open Source AI, ML & Data Science News Preview of Tensorflow 2.0 (the public prev...
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RStudio Server on Azure
RStudio Server Pro is now available on the Azure Marketplace, the company announced on the RStudio Blog earlier this month. This means you can launch RStudio Server Pro on an virtual machine with the memory, disk, and CPU configuration of your choice, and pay by the minute for the VM instance plus a the RStudio software charge. Then, you can use ...
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Tutorial: Sequential Pattern Mining in R for Business Recommendations
by Allison Koenecke, Data Scientist, AI & Research Group at Microsoft, with acknowledgements to Amita Gajewar and John-Mark Agosta. In this tutorial, Allison Koenecke demonstrates how Microsoft could recommend to customers the next set of services they should acquire as they expand their use of the Azure Cloud, by using a temporal extension to co...
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