(This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)
by Joseph Rickert
Answering email queries from friends and acquaintances from around the world wanting to attend useR! 2016 has been painful. It is amazing that the conference sold out a full two months before its start, but upon reflection, not unbelievable. From its inception useR! has been an "academic" conference both in spirit and location. Including this year's conference at Stanford, 10 of the 12 useR! conferences have been held on-site at academic institutions with limited physical space. All of these conferences have been very successful and great fun, and I think it would be fantastic if useR! could continue at university venues.
However, the R Community appears to be growing at a prodigious rate. The success of R with machine learning practitioners over the past couple of years and the attention being paid to R by Microsoft and other corporate users all but ensures that any academic venue attempting to contain the R community will be left bursting at the seams. Unless some professional organization, like the R Consortium for example, steps up to the task of organizing useR! at a convention center venue it seems to me the the need for R users to congregate will be met by a growing number of regional conferences. In this respect, European R users are particularly lucky this year with a few choices for R conferences still coming up.
The Cinquiémes Recontres R will be held on June 22nd through 24th in Toulouse. The conference bills itself as a national forum for sharing ideas about using R in a variety of disciplines including visualization, applied statistics, Bayesian Analysis, machine learning and more. With talks in both French and English, it has the potential to attract an international audience. Note that the program includes Ryan Hafen talking about tools for the analysis and visualization of large complex data sets in R, and Heather Turner speaking abut the inclusion of women in the R community.
R aficionados seeking a useR! like experience might consider the "Meeting of Heroes", the european R users meeting (eRum) conference that is being organized by Department of Statistics at Poznan University of Economics, the Estimator Students’ Association, and the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Methods at Poznan University of Life Sciences.
The conference is more than five months away (October 12 – 14) but already they have an outstanding line up of workshops.
Warsztaty wprowadzające do R (in Polish) – Adam Dąbrowski (UAM WNGiG)
Predictive modeling with R – Artur Suchwałko (Data Scientist & Owner at QuantUp (Poland) ||| Co-owner / CSO / Vice-CEO at MedicWave (Sweden))
Data Visualization using R – Matthias Templ (Vienna University of Technology & Statistics Austria & data-analysis OG)
Time series forecasting with R – Adam Zagdański (Faculty of Pure And Applied Mathematics, Wroclaw University of Technology; QuantUp)
R for expression profiling by Next Generation Sequencing – Paweł Łabaj (Austrian Academy of Science / Boku University Vienna)
Introduction to Bayesian Statistics with R and Stan – Rasmus Bååth (Lund University)
Small Area Estimation with R – Virgilio Gómez-Rubio (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)
R for industry and business: Statistical tools for quality control and improvement – Emilio L. Cano (The University of Castilla-La Mancha)
An introduction to changepoint models using R – Rebecca Killick (Lancaster University)
Visualising spatial data with R: from 'base' to 'shiny' – Robin Lovelace (Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, University of Leeds)
If you are thinking of going to eRum don't wait too long to sign up. The conference will be limited to 250 attendees, and the workshops have room for only 25 people. The call for papers closes June 15th. You can submit an abstract here.
The 10th R/Rmetrics Summer Workshop is coming up soon (June 24th and 25th) in Zurich. In addition to financial topics there will be sessions on Bayesian statistics, R and Shiny programming and much more.
If you are interested in insurance and actuarial science consider attending R in Insurance 2016, a one day conference to be held at the Cass Business School in London on Monday July 11th. Here, I have to mention that fellow BARUG organizer, Dan Murphy is giving an invited talk.
If you are looking for a larger more industry oriented conference then don't forget about EARL (Effective Applications of the R Language) to be held in London from September 13th through 15th. Do hurry if you would like to give a talk. Abstract submission closes tomorrow, April 29th!
Please do let me know in the comments below if I have missed anything.
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