Publications by David Smith
Create data visualizations like BBC News with the BBC’s R Cookbook
If you're looking a guide to making publication-ready data visualizations in R, check out the BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics. Announced in a BBC blog post this week, it provides scripts for making line charts, bar charts, and other visualizations like those below used in the BBC's data journalism. The cookbook is based ...
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AI, Machine Learning and Data Science Roundup: February 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 ONNX, the open interchange format for AI m...
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An architecture for real-time scoring with R
Let's say you've developed a predictive model in R, and you want to embed predictions (scores) from that model into another application (like a mobile or Web app, or some automated service). If you expect a heavy load of requests, R running on a single server isn't going to cut it: you'll need some kind of distributed architecture with enough ser...
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Where to find the worst weather in the US
Which US city has the worst weather? To answer that question, data analyst Taras Kaduk counted the number of pleasant days in each city and ranked them accordingly. For this analysis, a “pleasant” day is one where the average temperature was in the range 55°F-75°F, the maximum was in the range 60°-90°, the minimum was in the range 40°-70...
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R 3.5.3 now available
The R Core Team announced yesterday the release of R 3.5.3, and updated binaries for Windows and Linux are now available (with Mac sure to follow soon). This update fixes three minor bugs (to the functions writeLines, setClassUnion, and stopifnot), but you might want to upgrade just to avoid the “package built under R 3.5.4” warnings you migh...
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Availability of Microsoft R Open 3.5.2 and 3.5.3
It's taken a little bit longer than usual, but Microsoft R Open 3.5.2 (MRO) is now available for download for Windows and Linux. This update is based on R 3.5.2, and accordingly fixes a few minor bugs compared to MRO 3.5.1. The main change you will note is that new CRAN packages released since R 3.5.1 can now be used with this version of MRO. Mic...
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What’s new in R 3.6.0
A major update to the open-source R language, R 3.6.0, was released on April 26 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux. As a major update, it has many new features, user-visible changes and bug fixes. You can read the details in the release announcement, and in this blog post I'll highlight the most significant ones. Change...
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MRAN snapshots, and you
For almost five years, the entire CRAN repository of R packages has been archived on a daily basis at MRAN. If you use CRAN snapshots from MRAN, we'd love to hear how you use them in this survey. If you're not familiar with the concept, or just want to learn more, read on. Every day since September 17, 2014, we (Microsoft and, before the acquisit...
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Fun with R and the Noops
Earlier this week, Github introduced Noops, a collection of simple black-box machines with API endpoints, with the goal of challenging developers of all skill levels to solve problems with them. Five “Noops” machines have been released so far along with challenges suitable for beginner programmers, with 15 further machines (and some more comp...
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Updates on Microsoft’s R Roadmap in Azure
Yesterday, Microsoft's AI Customer Engineering Team posted the first in a series of blog posts on the state and future of support for R in Azure. Check out that post for some details on the forthcoming capabilities to support R and Python-based deployments in the Azure cloud service. The post references this guide to the machine learning servic...
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