Publications by David Smith
R among TechCrunch’s 5 Trendy Open-Source Techs for Big Data
Tim Gasper (Product Manager at Big Data platform Infochimps) has an informative article at TechCrunch that provides an overview of five open-source technologies trending now for Big Data applications. They are: Storm and Kafka (for processing stream data) Drill and Dremel (for ad-hoc queries of big data) R (for data science with big data) Greml...
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More data apps spawned by Sandy
As the clean-up continues on the eastern seaboard, I wanted to follow up on Monday's post on tracking Hurricane Sandy with Open Data with a couple of other R-based data applications spawned by the storm. Josef Fruehwald created an R script to tap into local weather sensors to keep track of air pressure, wind speed and rainfall near his home and...
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Watch Obama and Romney criss-cross the US
The Washington Post has an interactive graphic showing the rate at which the US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have visited the various states for campaign rallies and fundraisers. Here's how it looks today: You can clearly see the focus on key swing states like Florida and Ohio, as well as non-competitive (but donor-rich) ...
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Slides and replay for "The Rise of Data Science"
I had a great time presenting my new webinar yesterday, thanks to everyone who attended “The Rise of Data Science in the Age of Big Data Analytics” and especially those who submitted questions. Sorry I didn't have time to get to them all, but feel free to ask here in the comments. There's been some discussion recently about whether the data s...
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Another look at ideology of the US congress
In response to last week's post on the rapidly increasing ideology of the US Republican Party, Mike Lawrence suggested another way of looking at the DW-NOMINATE ideology data. Rather than simply looking at boxplots of the congress scores by party over time, we could fit a smooth curve to get a better sense of the trends over time. Mike provided R...
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Webinar Thursday: How R is used to optimize tractor production at John Deere
I just sat in on the rehearsal for Thursday's webinar by John Deere's Derek Hoffman, Order Fulfillment Forecasting at John Deere: How R Facilitates Creativity and Flexibility. Derek will give a spirited argument of why R is critical for the faming equipment manufacturer's operations: from forecasting demand for equipment, forecasting crop yields...
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In case you missed it: October 2012 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. Sponsorships for local R user groups from Revolution Analytics are now open to applicants worldwide.During the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in the US, several R-based apps used public weather and social media data to document its impact, like this timel...
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What’s new in Revolution R Enterprise 6.1
We're pleased to announce that the latest update to Revolution R Enterprise is available today! Existing subscribers will soon receive an email with update instructions, and the free academic distribution will be updated later today. Version 6.1 adds a frequently-requested big-data statistical modeling algorithm, adds new connectivity option for ...
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Video: How John Deere uses R
Farming equipment manufacturer John Deere uses R, and in yesterday's webinar their manager of forecast analytics, Derek Hoffman, explained what they use it for: In the presentation, Derek gave a spirited argument of why R is critical for John Deere's operations: from forecasting demand for equipment, to forecasting crop yields (they produce for...
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RStudio releases Shiny
RStudio has released a new package for R. Shiny allows R developers to build simple interactive Web-based interfaces for R scripts, using only R code (no JavaScript development required!). You can see some examples of Shiny in action in this blog post, and there are more details about Shiny's capabilities in this tutorial. Shiny was first announc...
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