useR! 2024: Full Schedule

In Person
8 - 11 July, 2024
Learn more and Register to Attend

The Sched app allows you to build your schedule but is not a substitute for your event registration. You must be registered for useR! 2024 to participate in the sessions. If you have not registered but would like to join us, please go to the event registration page to purchase a registration.

Please note: This schedule is automatically displayed in Central European Summer Time (UTC+02:00). To see the schedule in your preferred timezone, please select from the drop-down menu to the right, above "Filter by Date." The schedule is subject to change.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

The virtual program will take place on 2 July. Please see the virtual schedule page for more information.

14:00 CEST

Tutorial: Futureverse: Friendly Parallelization in R - Henrik Bengtsson, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) [Pre-Registration Required]

This 3-hour workshop introduces the Futureverse - A Unifying Parallelization Framework in R for Everyone - for any R developer looking for options to run their R code in parallel. Designed for participants familiar with R, the workshop does not require prior knowledge of R package development or parallel computing. It is structured into four parts, covering an introduction to futures, managing outputs, warnings, errors, map-reduce parallelization, and concluding with an open discussion. Futureverse (https://www.futureverse.org) is designed, so existing code can be parallelized with a minimal amount of modifications, and allow the developer to keep their focus on the main purpose of their code. We will explore parallel alternatives to familiar programming patterns in base R apply (future.apply), Tidyverse purrr (furrr), and foreach with doFuture. Each part will have hands-on learning components, ensuring participants leave with the skills to apply these techniques to their own projects. Instructions to participants will be made available online at https://www.futureverse.org/tutorials.html prior to the event. All material will be made available there after the event.

Registration:
To add this tutorial to your registration, log in to your existing registration, click the Modify Registration button, and navigate to the Reg Options page (page 4). Select the tutorial you want to attend.

Speakers

Henrik Bengtsson

Henrik Bengtsson, University of California San Francisco (UCSF)

UCSF, R Foundation, R Consortium, MSC in Computer Science, PhD in Mathematical Statistics, Applied, large-scale research in Bioinformatics and Genomics. R since 2000.

Monday July 8, 2024 14:00 - 17:30 CEST
Salzburg II

Efficient programming, Tutorial

11:00 CEST

Quarto: Elevating R Markdown for Advanced Publishing - Christophe Dervieux, POSIT PBC

In the dynamic landscape of data analysis and scientific publishing, R Markdown has been pivotal for the R community, allowing users to seamlessly blend code, narrative and results in a cohesive narrative. Now, Quarto emerges as a powerful tool that builds on years of experience but also goes beyond R Markdown, providing more flexibility and power in scientific communication. This talk aims to unveil Quarto's novel features with its latest 1.4 stable release. We will delve into how Quarto enhances the user experience for R enthusiasts, maintaining the syntax familiarity of R Markdown while introducing innovative functionalities like sophisticated figure and table handling, better project management, and versatile publication options across multiple formats, similar to R Markdown ones. Why switch to Quarto from R Markdown? In which cases? How does Quarto integrate with existing workflows? This presentation aims at answering usual user questions, to inspire them to try out Quarto.

Speakers

Christophe Dervieux

Open Source Software Engineer, POSIT PBC

Christophe Dervieux is an Open Source Software Engineer at Posit PBC. He specializes in the R Markdown and Quarto ecosystems. With contributions to key R packages and co-authorship in the R Markdown Cookbook, Christophe brings a deep understanding of scientific publishing tools to... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 11:00 - 11:20 CEST
Salzburg II

Quarto and reporting

11:20 CEST

Mlr3summary: Concise and Interpretable Summaries for Machine Learning Models - Susanne Dandl, LMU Munich and Munich Center for Machine Learning & Marc Becker, LMU Munich

In machine learning (ML), transparency and interpretability are central to promoting trust and informed decision-making. This contribution introduces a novel R package for ML model summaries, centered on performance measures and interpretation methods. The package draws inspiration from the summary method for (additive/generalized) linear models in R which generates a table that encapsulates model performance, effect sizes and directions for individual variables, and model complexity. In our contribution, we extend this methodology to non-parametric ML models, creating a concise yet informative table that facilitates analogous conclusions. The clarity of the structured output can enhance and expedite the model selection process, making it a helpful tool for practitioners and researchers alike. Our talk presents the core functionality of the R package and addresses some implementation details, as well as potential pitfalls. With this, we hope to contribute some advancements in model transparency and comparability in the field of ML.

Speakers

Marc Becker

-, LMU Munich

Marc Becker is working on the mlr3 project as a research software engineer and is mainly responsible for the optimization packages. He obtained a Bachelor's Degree (B.Sc.) in Geography from the Freie Universität Berlin and a Master's Degree (M.Sc.) in Geoinformatics from the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität... Read More →

Susanne Dandl

Dr., LMU Munich and Munich Center for Machine Learning

Susanne is a postdoctoral researcher, focussing on the intersection between machine learning, statistics and causality. She did her Bachelor and Master at the Department of Statistics, LMU Munich, Germany. She obtained her doctorate in December 2023 from the same university.

Tuesday July 9, 2024 11:20 - 11:40 CEST
Salzburg II

Quarto and reporting

11:40 CEST

Achieving Corporate Design Consistency in Reports with Indiedown: An R Markdown Solution - Angelica Becerra, Cynkra

Creating organizational reports, letters, and documents that adhere to strict layouts and graphical design standards in an efficient a consistent way is a significant challenge. This session presents the package [indiedown](https://indiedown.cynkra.com) designed to facilitate the creation of PDF R Markdown templates that align with organizations' design layouts and guidelines. A customized R Markdown template represents a significant step towards aligning data science with corporate reporting needs. By providing a structured, reproducible, and visually consistent approach to document creation, this tool empowers organizations to maintain high standards of communication and documentation. This work emphasizes the broader applicability of R Markdown in organizational and business settings distributing templates via an R package. By facilitating the creation of visually appealing, data-rich documents that comply with corporate identity. This presentation will not only offer practical solutions to common reporting challenges but also encourage dialogue on customized R tools that support specific corporate needs.

Speakers

Angelica Becerra

Data Scientist, Cynkra

Angelica Becerra is a statistician and data scientist with experience in consulting governmental offices on large-scale survey studies and statistical analysis. She has developed data analysis projects using R and Python with a focus on visualization, web scraping, and reports. Angelica... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 11:40 - 12:00 CEST
Salzburg II

Quarto and reporting

12:00 CEST

Parametrized Nice Reports for PDF with Quarto - Thomas Vroylandt, Kantiles

Being able to produce hundreds, even thousands, of reports at once with parameterized reporting is one of the most powerful tools available to R users (and Python users too, thanks to Quarto). But, when making reports in this way, problems can arise. A chart that works well in one report looks terrible in another. A map that fits nicely into a report for one state doesn't fit in another state's report. Possibilities for errors abound. In this talk, I will share hard-earned lessons on best practices for generating parameterized reports on PDF while using web technologies (and thus avoid LaTeX). With advice on a range of topics, including formatting data, designing reports, and creating plots that work across multiple reports, this talk will help those who don't just want to do parameterized reporting, but want to do it well. This talk will cover a set of methods for producing parametrized reports for PDF, going from the good old method (Rmd and pagedown) to new ones (Quarto and pagedjs-cli or Quarto and weasyprint, Typst) plus the pagedreport package, which will gain a Quarto extension before the conference.

Speakers

Thomas Vroylandt

Co-Founder & Consultant, Kantiles

Thomas Vroylandt is a consultant at Kantiles. He also work as a consultant for R for the Rest of Us where he supports business around the world improving their reporting. He is the creator of the pagedreport package and is expert with dealing with PDF reports using pagedjs and similar... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
Salzburg II

Quarto and reporting

13:20 CEST

rainbowR - a Community That Supports, Connects and Promotes LGBTQ+ People Who Code in R - Ella Kaye, University of Warwick & Hanne Oberman, Utrecht University

rainbowR is a friendly community for LGBTQ+ folks who code in R. We run monthly online meet-ups where participants chat and share their R work in a supportive environment. We also organise the buddy scheme, which randomly pairs members of the community, to encourage people to meet and connect. We have exciting plans for the future! You'll learn about what rainbowR does and how you can get involved, whether as a member of the LGBTQ+ community or as an ally, and hopefully forge new connections at the conference and beyond. We believe the whole R community benefits when that community is diverse and inclusive.

Speakers

Ella Kaye

Ms, University of Warwick

Ella is a Research Software Engineer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick, UK. She works to increase sustainability and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in the R Project. She also runs rainbowR, a community that supports, promotes and connects LGBTQ... Read More →

Hanne Oberman

MSc, Utrecht University

Statistician interested in data visualization, interdisciplinarity, and open science. Hanne is a PhD candidate in Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht University, working on computational evaluation and data visualization in the Missing Data research group. Core developer for the... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 13:20 - 13:25 CEST
Salzburg II

Community and outreach, Lightning Talk

13:25 CEST

Leveraging R-Ladies Paris Reach for Community Impact - Chaima Boughanmi, BVA Xsight

This presentation aims to introduce the R-Ladies Paris community, a local chapter of the global organization R-Ladies Global, which strives to reduce gender inequalities and enhance the visibility, participation, and recognition of contributions from underrepresented genders within the R community. We will discuss our strategies to bring R enthusiasts together, fostering a collaborative environment where individuals can learn from each other. We will share insights on how to maintain an active presence to encourage member engagement. Moreover, we'll provide tips and pieces of advice on how we make our meetups accessible to connect with a broader audience. We will address the resources provided by R-Ladies Global to support the activities of chapters, which could serve as encouragement for you to embark on your R-Ladies journey in the future.

Speakers

Chaima Boughanmi

Data Scientist & Business modeler, BVA Xsight

Chaïma, a junior Data Scientist at BVA in Paris, is an engineer in statistics and information analysis with a master’s degree in Data Science from Université Paris Saclay. Experienced in modelling, data analysis,coding and ML,she has worked across various sectors. With a passion... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 13:25 - 13:30 CEST
Salzburg II

Community and outreach, Lightning Talk

13:30 CEST

R Is for Everybody - Ekaterina Akimova, Laboratory for Immunological and Molecular Cancer Research

I am a female scientist working in cancer research. Working on my PhD project, I realized that I could not make a use of the huge data amounts I generate without proper coding skills. At that point, my journey into R began. Knowing absolutely nothing about R or any other programming language, I was trying to perform an analysis and get the final output that I aimed for. With a lot of help from our bioinformatician, we ended up with a peer-reviewed publication, summarizing our project and analysis. During these times, I often wished for guidance and support by community members who may be struggling with similar issues themselves. Unfortunately, this community did not exist in Salzburg. I continued my work and my learning process, but kept wishing for some R friends. Until finally, in January 2024, I launched a local R-Ladies Chapter in Salzburg. R-Ladies is a worldwide non-profit organization that promotes gender diversity within R Community by organizing educational and networking events. In this lighting talk, I would like to encourage everyone, in particular people of under-represented genders, to put aside their fear of coding and embrace the world of R.

Speakers

Ekaterina Akimova

Dr. rer. nat., Laboratory for Immunological and Molecular Cancer Research

I completed my PhD at LIMCR, investigating DNA damage in cancer. During this time, I worked on various projects, including the development of R-based analysis pipelines, and found my passion for coding. In 2023, I finished the doctorate, but continued my research endeavours as a PostDoc... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 13:30 - 13:35 CEST
Salzburg II

Community and outreach, Lightning Talk

13:35 CEST

The State of R Programming and Its Prospects in Africa - Elisha Chitsenga, Crestly Resorts

Data and statistical modeling techniques are the backbone of any modern society, but this is not true in Africa. Only a few countries have used this notion. Having recognized this issue, it appears that a lack of use, awareness, and comprehension of these modeling methodologies has crippled our countries, as a lack of current and detailed information has left stakeholders reliant on obsolete data and information for decision-making. Based on the information presented above, it is time for African society to devote itself to the implementation and use of R programming, which we see as a game changer due to its open source nature. In this enlightening talk, the presenter will discuss the challenges Africa faces, particularly in data collection and analysis, and how R programming can help, as well as how the community can collaborate with African aspiring data scientists to help improve lives and future generations across the continent.

Speakers

Elisha Chitsenga

Software Developer, Community, and Business Leader, Crestly Resorts

Elisha is a software developer with over 10 years of expertise, an accounting degree, a leader in the community and company, and a fully accredited information systems auditor. His main goals are to use cloud-based solutions, Linux, RISC-V, Python, and R coding to help the African... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 13:35 - 13:40 CEST
Salzburg II

Community and outreach, Lightning Talk

13:40 CEST

Building Community Through the Power of Your Voice - Joanna Moćko-Łazarewicz, Appsilon

Unlock the potential of your voice! Join me for a quick exploration of why speaking at industry events matters specifically within our R ecosystem. Discover how sharing your insights not only creates a positive ripple effect but also empowers others to benefit from your experiences. From networking to personal growth, we'll delve into the transformative impact of sharing your story. I'll share insightful stats about the R conference landscape and offer actionable insights on becoming a speaker. Learn how to navigate the process and kickstart your speaking journey. Let's illuminate the path to a more connected and empowered R community together, where your voice becomes a valuable resource for collective growth.

Speakers

Joanna Moćko-Lazarewicz

Community and Events Lead, Appsilon

Joanna is a seasoned event manager with a fervor for cultivating connections within the tech community. Currently, she’s serving as the Community and Events Lead at Appsilon. In her role, Joanna takes pride in organizing ShinyConf, an event that has become a staple for hundreds... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 13:40 - 13:45 CEST
Salzburg II

Community and outreach, Lightning Talk

13:45 CEST

R4CR: R Education for Clinical Researchers via Quarto - JInhwan Kim, Zarathu Co., Ltd.

Clinical research is one of the fastest growing fields in the world, and R is becoming increasingly important as a way to handle data, especially as more and more studies are conducted with small numbers of patients, or in collaboration with multiple institutions to collect data and conduct research. Rather than using R to analyze data, clinical researchers have typically focused on study design, data collection, and validation, while coding has been done by professional developers, but now more and more clinical researchers are trying to use R themselves, including data management. To this end, we have been providing R training for clinical researchers, but there is a lot of room for improvement compared to professional training services, such as reflecting the latest R-related technology trends and making the training experience better. In this session, I will share how we decided to use Quarto, what we considered in order to provide R training for clinical researchers, how we actually used Quarto, the advantages and disadvantages of using Quarto, our achievements, and our future plans.

Speakers

JInhwan Kim

R developer, Zarathu Co., Ltd.

Jinhwan is R / Shiny developer with background in bioinformatics. He has dedicated his career to crafting data products using R ecosystem across diverse industries as a Data Scientist. Currently, He is a key contributor at Zarathu, where he specializes in developing R packages and... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 13:45 - 13:50 CEST
Salzburg II

Data science education, Lightning Talk

14:10 CEST

Reproducible Data Science with WebAssembly and WebR - George Stagg, Posit, PBC

A fundamental principle of the scientific method is peer review and independent verification of results. Good science depends on transparency and reproducibility. However, in a recent study a substantial 74% of research code failed to run without errors, often caused by diverse computing environments. This talk will discuss the principles of numerical reproducibility in research and show how software can be pinned to specific versions and self-contained as a universal binary package using WebAssembly. This ensures seamless reproducibility on any machine equipped with a modern web browser and, using tools such as Shinylive, could provide a new way for researchers to share results with the community.

Speakers

George Stagg

Software Engineer, Posit, PBC

George is a senior software engineer working on the webR project as part of the Open Source Team at Posit. A former academic, George also has experience with teaching and research in computational mathematics, statistics and physics. When not working with software, George enjoys hacking... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 14:10 - 14:30 CEST
Salzburg II

Shiny + dashboards + web apps

14:30 CEST

Real-Time Anomaly Detection on Voting Sundays Using R and Shiny - Simon Graf, Statistisches Amt Kanton Zürich

Swiss voters head to the polls around four times a year. One of the responsibilities of the cantons is to collect the results from the municipalities, process and transmit them to the federal level. The Canton of Zurich used to check the data manually and gave feedback in case of suspicious looking results, however this non-systematic approach on an individual data point level was error-prone, labour-intense and often lacked the context of historical trends and issue specific dynamics. To remedy these shortcomings, we developed an R- and Shiny-based application called “PlausiApp”, which conducts outlier detection in real-time on a variety of results, such as shares of voting channels used, intracommunal differences in participation levels, or the deviation of the results from our prediction. It is in use since 2020. The application works as follows: Prior to the voting Sunday, we load historical data and store it in the project repository. On the voting Sunday, the application transforms the live data and runs the checks. Finally, the results are presented in a shiny dashboard.

Speakers

Simon Graf

Political Data Scientist, Statistisches Amt Kanton Zürich

Political Data Scienctist

Tuesday July 9, 2024 14:30 - 14:50 CEST
Salzburg II

Shiny + dashboards + web apps

14:50 CEST

No-Code Data Analysis and Visualization Dashboards with Blockr - David Granjon, cynkra GmbH & John Coene, The Y Company

Despite widespread adoption of tools such as Shiny and dplyr, creating dashboards in R remains challenging for non-coding developers. Solutions like PowerBI or Tableau, while popular, are proprietary and expensive, offer limited reproducibility, and have restricted integration with the R ecosystem. To address this gap, we introduce blockr, an open-source dashboard builder (https://github.com/blockr-org). blockr simplifies the construction of parameterized data pipelines as a web application, enabling collaboration and easy sharing of results through self-contained code generation. We emphasize modularity by decomposing pipelines into 'blocks'. These 'blocks' can be assembled into 'stacks', which can be connected so that the output of one stack serves as the input for others. This architecture results in a reactive dashboard that allows upstream changes to cascade through the analysis, providing instant feedback to the user. General-purpose blocks provided by blockr can be combined with user-created blocks to expand functionality to use-case specific needs. This approach makes it easy to leverage the vast and mature ecosystem of R packages.

Speakers

David Granjon

Lead Shiny, cynkra GmbH

David Granjon is Lead Shiny at cynkra since September 2023. He holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Université de Lausanne. He is the founder of the open source RinteRface organization, where he develops Shiny extensions, writes books and... Read More →

John Coene

Co-Founder, The Y Company

Tuesday July 9, 2024 14:50 - 15:10 CEST
Salzburg II

Shiny + dashboards + web apps

15:10 CEST

MaNTrA Labor Room Analytics Platform: Harnessing the Power of R for Public Health - Girdhari Bora & Ajil Joseph, Tattva Foundation

MaNTrA dashboard is a Shiny based web application designed for visualizing and reporting Maternal and Child Health Indicators. The application captures data from labour room registries in Public Health Facilities in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The application currently supports the state health department in tracking and visualizing data for over 4.5 million deliveries from 5800 facilities and is growing at a rate of approximately 6000 deliveries per day. Moreover, the application is further being scaled to cover all 7000 delivery points in the state with almost 40,000 users at different levels of decision making. The dashboard facilitates user role-based access with 11 pages providing GIS visualizations, advanced drill-down functionalities and custom reports as per the user requirements. The application tracks indicators related to deliveries, births, birth and death registrations, patient feedback and medical practitioner performance. Considering the scale and volume of the dashboard, the application is designed for optimal memory consumption, concurrent user handling and faster processing thus providing the best experience for the end users.

Speakers

Ajil Joseph

Research Scientist (Data Analytics), Tattva Foundation

A data analyst and an information systems researcher specializing in shiny web app development, data visualization and system design. Has expertise in developing health analytics platforms, statistical modelling and machine learning model development in R. Currently, working as the... Read More →

Girdhari Bora

Chief Innovation Officer, Tattva Foundation

Girdhari Bora is an ICT4D professional with nearly 20 years of experience in e-innovation, digital health, and action research. He has led many projects in scalable e-innovations across sectors such as public health, microfinance, agriculture, and education. He is the co-founder of... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 15:10 - 15:30 CEST
Salzburg II

Shiny + dashboards + web apps

15:30 CEST

Deploying RShiny-Based Applications in Financial Institutions - Goran Lovric, Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich AG

This session focuses on a detailed approach to deploy RShiny-based applications in risk management of financial institutions on in-house servers, also providing examples and a case study of those applications such as internal rating models, GRC tools, incident management tools as well as risk assessment tools. The focus is clearly on utilizing in-house servers and architecture to deploy RShiny-based applications quantifying, presenting and reporting risk within the environment of a European Central Bank (ECB) regulated bank.

Speakers

Goran Lovric

Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich AG

Goran Lovric has over 17 years of professional experience in reputable, national and international financial companies, carrying senior management and senior leadership responsibilities in (financial and non-financial) risk management. Mr. Lovric holds degrees in Law and Quantitative... Read More →

Tuesday July 9, 2024 15:30 - 15:50 CEST
Salzburg II

Shiny + dashboards + web apps

11:50 CEST

The R Contribution Working Group - Heather Turner, University of Warwick

The R Contribution Working Group (RCWG) was established in July 2020, in response to concerns raised at useR! 2020 about the sustainability of the community of contributors to base R, as well as the demographic diversity of this community. The working group is a collaboration between R core developers, groups focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as R enthusiasts from the wider community. This talk will delve into the key initiatives led by the RCWG, explore their impact, and outline future plans. Initially the RCWG focused on communication: engaging in social media, working on novice-friendly documentation and organizing events focused on people completely new to contribution, making particular effort to reach out to people from underrepresented groups. More recently, the focus has shifted to upskilling potential contributors and initiatives to directly support people in making contributions. Examples include R Contributor Office Hours and the R Dev Day being held as a satellite to useR! 2024.

Speakers

Heather Turner

Dr, University of Warwick

Heather Turner is a Research Software Engineering Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. She is an active member of the R community, in particular, she is on the board of the R Foundation and chairs both the R Contribution Working Group and the Forwards taskforce... Read More →

Wednesday July 10, 2024 11:50 - 12:10 CEST
Salzburg II

Community and outreach

12:10 CEST

I'm Only Giving This Talk Because I'm a Woman - Clarissa Barratt, Jumping Rivers

It will come as no surprise to the reader that women are underrepresented in the R community. Anyone who has organised a conference will know the feeling of seeing the abstracts come in with a particular demographic making up most of the entries. What do we do at this point? Do we positively discriminate to put more women out there? Is that patronising? It certainly leads to being told “you’re only giving the talk because you’re a woman”, or “you’re definitely going to get accepted, you’re a woman”. To have your abilities as a scientist and presenter questioned like that is awful, but is it worth it to move towards equal representation? And how do you fight the imposter syndrome that it instils? There is no perfect answer to these questions, but I wondered, has anyone tried asking the women? I have been gathering the thoughts of some women in the R Community, and in this talk I’d like to present the big picture. Some are newer to the community, and some have been around a bit longer. How do their experiences differ? What help is out there for things like imposter syndrome? Interviewees include Dr Nic Crane, Dr Nicola Rennie, Dr Heather Turner and Dr Sarah Heaps.

Speakers

Clarissa Barratt

Data Scientist, Jumping Rivers

Clarissa is the Ambassador for Data Science at Jumping Rivers. While working towards her PhD in Quantum Physics, Clarissa discovered her love of science communication. Her goal is to make data science accessible to as many people as possible.

Wednesday July 10, 2024 12:10 - 12:30 CEST
Salzburg II

Community and outreach

15:00 CEST

Web APIs with Httr2 - Hadley Wickham, Posit

httr2 is an R package that helps you generate and perform HTTP requests then process the responses. In this talk, I'll introduce you to httr2 and the basics of HTTP, so you can learn what powers so much of the modern internet, and how you can work with it from R. httr2 is the successor to httr and has been under development for around two years. Compared to httr, httr2 has an explicit request object which leads to a more familiar interface where you can iteratively build up complex requests with the pipe. There's no need to stop using httr, as we'll continue to maintain it for many years to come, but for new projects, I'd highly recommend giving httr2 a shot.

Speakers

Hadley Wickham

Chief Scientist, Posit

Hadley is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (like the tidyverse, which includes... Read More →

Wednesday July 10, 2024 15:00 - 15:20 CEST
Salzburg II

Interfaces with other programming languages

15:20 CEST

C for R Users - Ella Kaye, University of Warwick

Much of base R is written in C. As R users, we may encounter this code when debugging our own code. As R contributors, an understanding of C can enable us to find the root cause of a bug and/or propose a patch to the C code to fix a bug. In any case, learning a new programming language can be fun and rewarding! In this talk, I'll discuss why, as R users/programmers, we may want to learn C, and resources for doing so. I'll show examples of how C is used in the codebase of base R. I'll give an example of how, with only a little C knowledge, it was possible to add a new feature into the R language (specifying colours with three-digit hex codes). Finally, I'll promote the C Study Group for R contributors as a friendly community learning C together.

Speakers

Ella Kaye

Ms, University of Warwick

Wednesday July 10, 2024 15:20 - 15:40 CEST
Salzburg II

Interfaces with other programming languages

15:40 CEST

Unveiling the R Package Universe: Exploring CRAN Ecosystem with Knowledge Graphs - Dennis Irorere, Tripadvisor, Inc

Dive into the heart of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) ecosystem in this session, where we introduce the concept of knowledge graphs to navigate the vast landscape of R packages. By constructing a knowledge graph that captures package dependencies, author relationships, and semantic associations, we enable users to explore, analyse, and visualise the intricate web of interactions within CRAN. Discover how leveraging knowledge graphs enhances package discovery, facilitates collaboration, and fosters innovation within the R community. Join us as we embark on a journey to unlock the hidden insights and synergies within the R package universe, empowering users to harness the full potential of CRAN for their data science endeavours.

Speakers

Dennis Irorere

Mr., Tripadvisor, Inc

Dennis is a data engineer with over five years of R experience, began as a community builder, mentoring aspiring data scientists. Now, he leverages R and other tools to develop intelligent systems, employing graph and relational databases for diverse data challenges.

Wednesday July 10, 2024 15:40 - 16:00 CEST
Salzburg II

Interfaces with other programming languages

11:30 CEST

Desert Island Docker: R Edition - Andrew Collier, Fathom Data

What 3 Docker images would you choose if you were shipwrecked on a desert island? Choosing the right images will determine whether you are rescued or end up in a cannibals' cooking pot (R images will make you unpalatable). Docker is an essential tool for survival as an R developer, regardless of whether you are stranded or not. In this talk I'll describe three R Docker images that I consider essential for survival on a desert island. I'll demonstrate how to set up and build a custom image. And finally I'll demonstrate how using a Docker image can simplify CI/CD and deployment. - What is Docker? - Food & Shelter: Base Image - SOS Signal: Shiny Image - Building a Raft: Custom Image (which includes RJava and uses renv) - Applications - CI/CD - Deployment

Speakers

Andrew Collier

Dr, Fathom Data

Andrew is Lead Data Scientist at Fathom Data. He spends his days tinkering with R, Python and Docker.

Thursday July 11, 2024 11:30 - 11:50 CEST
Salzburg II

R workflow + deployment + production

11:50 CEST

Flowchart: An R Package for Creating Participant Flow Diagrams Integrated with Tidyverse - Pau Satorra, Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute and Hospital (IGTP)

The presentation will be a brief tutorial about a new released R package in CRAN called {flowchart} to create participant flow diagrams directly from a dataframe (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/flowchart/index.html). In health research, a patient flowchart is the best way to show the flow of participants in a study when reporting results as stated by the CONSORT guideline (https://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c332.long). There are several packages in R for drawing flowcharts using different approaches but generally the programming is quite complex and the numbers need to be manually entered or parameterized beforehand. This new package uses a different approach integrated into the tidyverse framework. It allows you to create many different types of flowcharts in an easy and much more reproducible way because it automatically adapts to the data. This means we don’t have to manually set the flowchart parameters, such as the box coordinates or the numbers to display . The main idea behind the package is to create flowcharts from an initial dataset by combining different basic functions with the pipe operator (\|\> or %\>%).

Speakers

Pau Satorra

Mr, Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute and Hospital (IGTP)

I'm a biostatistician with a background in mathematics and 4 years of experience in clinical research analysis. In 2019 I graduated in Mathematics from the University of Barcelona (UB). In 2023, I graduated from the Master in Fundamental Principles of Data Science at UB. From 2019... Read More →

Thursday July 11, 2024 11:50 - 12:10 CEST
Salzburg II

R workflow + deployment + production

12:10 CEST

Optimising Your Git WorkFlow - Colin Gillespie, https://jumpingrivers.com/

Everyone(?!) uses git in their day-to-day R workflow. Very soon, pushing, pulling, cloning and forking become second nature. But once you’ve mastered the basics, what next? This talk discusses the next steps in using Git. Wouldn’t it be nice if our code was automatically formatted? Errors in our packages flagged? Packages deployed to a remote CRAN-like repository. Well, have you considered GitHub Actions? Have you started working with other data scientists? How should you set up your repo to ensure a smooth workflow? How should merge requests be handled? How do you best utilise Git issues? Is your code sensitive? Should you set up GPG keys for commits? How should you ensure your API keys remain hidden? This talk aims to point useRs in the right direction for a friction-free R workflow.

Speakers

Colin Gillespie

CTO, Jumping Rivers

Colin is a Senior Statistics lecturer at Newcastle University and is a co-founder & CTO of Jumping Rivers. He has used R for over twenty years and has been teaching R for the past fifteen years. He co-authored the O’Reilly book on Efficient R Programming.

Thursday July 11, 2024 12:10 - 12:30 CEST
Salzburg II

R workflow + deployment + production

12:30 CEST

Building Large-Scale Simulation Pipelines Using Targets, Git and GitHub Actions - Sergio Olmos, Sanofi

Innovative clinical trial designs typically involve advanced statistical methods and extensive simulations. Building these complex simulation pipelines introduces challenges in reproducibility and transparency not easily addressed by traditional development workflows. In this session we will present how to use the targets R package, a Make-like pipeline tool, to develop efficient and reproducible simulation pipelines for innovative clinical trial designs. We will then show how Git and GitHub Actions can be used to deploy these large-scale simulation pipelines to cloud computing instances/clusters. The combination of these tools results in a robust and efficient workflow, enhancing the reproducibility of complex simulation pipelines. We will provide a detailed walkthrough of our approach, complete with practical examples and best practices, making it a valuable resource for statisticians and research software engineers working on innovative clinical trial designs and beyond.

Speakers

Sergio Olmos

Statistician, Sanofi

Sergio Olmos is a statistician in Sanofi working on the implementation of innovative clinical trial designs within the Statistical Innovation Hub. He is an experienced R developer with experience building reproducible analytical pipelines and creating R packages using software engineering... Read More →

Thursday July 11, 2024 12:30 - 12:50 CEST
Salzburg II

R workflow + deployment + production