The Second Annual DCR Conference made its way to the ICC Auditorium at Georgetown University last week on November 8th and 9th. A sold-out crowd of R enthusiasts and data scientists gathered to explore, share and inspire ideas.

We had so many great speakers join us this year: David Robinson, Malorie Hughes, Stephanie Kirmer, Daniel Chen, Emily Robinson, Kelly O’Briant, Marck Vaisman, Elizabeth Sweeney, Brian Wright, Ami Gates, Selina Carter, Refael Lav, Thomas Jones, Abhijit Dasgupta, Angela Li, Alex Engler, BJ Bloom, Samantha Tyner, Tatyana Tsvetovat, Danya Murali, Ronald Cappellini, Jon Harmon, Kaelen Medeiros, Kimberly Kreiss and myself.

As always, the food was delicious! Our caterer even surprised us with Lander cookies. 

David Robinson shared his Ten Tremendous Tricks in the Tidyverse. Always enthusiastic, DRob did a great job showing both well known and obscure functions for an easier data workflow.

Elizabeth Sweeney gave an awesome talk on Visualizing the Environmental Impact of Beef Consumption using Plotly and Shiny. We explored the impact of eating different cuts of beef in terms of the number of animal lives, Co2 emissions, water usage, and land usage. Did you know that there is a big difference in the environmental impact of consuming 100 pounds of hanger steak versus the same weight in ground beef? She used plotly to make interactive graphics and R Shiny to make an interactive webpage to explore the data.

The integrated development environment, RStudio, fully integrated themselves into the environment.

As a father, I’ve earned the right to make dad jokes (see above). You can see the slides for my talk, Raising Baby with R. While babies are commonly called bundles of joy, they are also bundles of data. Being the child of a data scientist and neuroscientist my son was certain to be analyzed myriad ways. I discussed how we used data to narrow down possible names then looked at using time series methods to analyze his sleeping and eating patterns. All in the name of science.

Malorie Hughes Analyzing Tweets Again

We also organized a Tweeting competition with the help of Malorie Hughes, our Twitter scorekeeper. Check out the DCR 2019 Twitter Dashboard with the Mash-Up Metric Details she created.

Our winner for Contribution & Engagement was Emily Robinson. Other notable winners included Kimberly Kreiss (see slides), Will Angel and Jon Harmon.

There was a glitch in the system and one of our own organizers and former Python user won a prize. We let her keep it, and now she has no excuse not to learn R.

Not to mention we had some great workshops on November 7th, preceding the conference:

• Exploring Data With the Tidyverse by David Robinson
• Geospatial Statistics and Mapping in R by Kaz Sakamoto
• Git for Data Science by Daniel Chen

Thanks to R-Ladies and Data Community D.C. for helping us spread the word.

Videos

The videos for the conference will be posted in the coming weeks to YouTube.com.

See You Next Year

Looking forward to more great conferences at next year’s NYR in the spring, Dublin R in the summer, and DCR again in the fall!

Hex Stickers

We went all out an ordered a few thousand hex stickers.

Speaker Slides

We don’t have them all yet but here are some to get started:

• Daniel Chen: R and Python Coexisting in the Same Development Environment
• Emily Robinson: funneljoin: Defining a Tidy Grammar of Funnels in R
• Kaelen Medeiros: Metric Design and Dashboarding with tidymetrics and shinybones
• Malorie Hughes: Dashboarding Like a Boss
• Samantha Tyner: Pagedown: in HTML We Trust
• Stephanie Kirmer: Animation for Dataviz in R
• Angela Li: The Care and Feeding of Spatial Data
• Kelly O’Briant: Reflections on a Year Spent Talking to Data Scientists About DevOps
• Jon Harmon: RBERT: Cutting Edge NLP in R
• Jared Lander: Raising Baby with R

 

Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.