The sixth annual (and first virtual) “New York” R Conference took place August 5-6 & 12-15. Almost 300 attendees, and 30 speakers, plus a stand-up comedian and a whiskey masterclass leader, gathered remotely to explore, share, and inspire ideas.

We had many awesome speakers, many new and some, returning: Dr. Rob J Hyndman (Monash University), Dr. Adam Obeng (Facebook), Ludmila Janda (Amplify), Emily Robinson (Warby Parker), Daniel Chen (Virginia Tech, Lander Analytics), Dr. Jon Krohn (untapt), Dr. Andrew Gelman (Columbia University), David Smith (Microsoft), Laura Gabrysiak (Visa), Brooke Watson (ACLU), Dr. Sebastian Teran Hidalgo (Vroom), Catherine Zhou (Codecademy), Dr. Jacqueline Nolis (Brightloom), Sonia Ang (Microsoft), Emily Dodwell (AT&T Labs Research), Jonah Gabry (Columbia University, Stan Development Team), Wes MckKinney and Dr. Neal Richardson (Ursa Labs), Dr. Thomas Mock (RStudio), Dr. David Robinson, (Heap), Dr. Max Kuhn (RStudio), Dr. Erin LeDell (H2O.ai), Monica Thieu (Columbia University), Camelia Hssaine (Codecademy), and myself and, coming soon, a bonus talk by Heather Nolis (T-Mobile) which will be shared on YouTube as soon as our team is done editing them, along with all the other talks.

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from the conference:

Andrew Gelman Gave Another 40-Minute Talk (no slides, as always)

Our favorite quotes from Andrew Gelman’s talk, Truly Open Science: From Design and Data Collection to Analysis and Decision Making, which had no slides, as usual:

“Everyone training in statistics becomes a teacher.”

“The most important thing you should take away — put multiple graphs on a page.”

“Honesty and transparency are not enough.”

“Bad science doesn’t make someone a bad person.”

Laura Gabrysiak Shows us We Are Driven By Experience, and not Brand Loyalty…Hope you Folks had a Good Experience!

Laura’s talk on re-Inventing customer engagement with machine learning went through several interesting use cases from her time at Visa. In addition to being a data scientist, she is an active community organizer and the co-founder of R-Ladies Miami.

Adam Obeng Delivered a Talk on Adaptive Experimentation

One of my former students at Columbia University, Adam Obeng, gave a great presentation on his adaptive experimentation. We learned that adaptive experimentation is three things: The name of (1) a family of techniques, (2) Adam’s team at Facebook, and (3) an open source package produced by said team. He went through the applications which are hyper-parameter optimization for ML, experimentation with multiple continuous treatments, and physical experiments or manufacturing.

Dr. Jacqueline Nolis Invited Us to Crash Her Viral Website, Tweet Mashup

Jacqueline asked the crowd to crash her viral website,Tweet Mashup, and gave a great talk on her experience building it back in 2016. Her website that lets you combine the tweets of two different people. After spending a year making it in .NET, when she launched the site it became an immediate sensation. Years later, she was getting more and more frustrated maintaining the F# code and decided to see if I could recreate it in Shiny. Doing so would require having Shiny integrate with the Twitter API in ways that hadn’t been done by anyone before, and pushing the Twitter API beyond normal use cases.

Attendees Participated in Two Virtual Happy Hours Packed with Fun

At the Friday Happy Hour, we had a mathematical standup comedian for the first time in R Conference history. Comic and math major Rachel Lander (no relationship to me!) entertained us with awesome math and stats jokes.

Following the stand up, we had a Whiskey Master Class with our Vibe Sponsor Westland Distillery, and another one on Saturday with Bruichladdich Distillery (hard to pronounce and easy to drink). Attendees and speakers learned and drank together, whether it be their whiskey, matchas, soda or water.

All Proceeds from the A(R)T Auction went to the R Foundation Again

A newer tradition, the A(R)T Auction, took place again! We featured pieces by artists in the R Community, and all proceeds were donated to the R Foundation. The highest-selling piece at auction was Street Cred (2020) by Vivian Peng (Lander Analytics and Los Angeles Mayor’s Office, Innovation Team). The second highest was a piece by Jacqueline Nolis (Brightloom, and Build a Career in Data Science co-author), R Conference speaker, Designed by Allison Horst, artist in residence at RStudio. 

 

The R-Ladies Group Photo Happened, Even Remotely!

As per tradition, we took an R-Ladies group photo, but, for the first time, remotely– as a screenshot! We would like to note that many more R-Ladies were present in the chat, but just chose not to share video.

Jon Harmon, Edna Mwenda, and Jessica Streeter win Raspberri Pis, Bluetooth Headphones, and Tenkeyless Keyboards for Most Active Tweeting During the Conference

This year’s Twitter Contest, in Malorie’s words, was a “ruthless but noble war.” You can see the NYR 2020 Dashboard here. A custom started that DCR 2018 by our Twitter scorekeeper Malorie Hughes (@data_all_day) has returned every year by popular demand, and now she’s stuck with it forever! Congratulations to our winners!

50+ Conference Attendees Participated in Pre-Conference Workshops Before

For the first time ever, workshops took place over the course of several days to promote work-life balance, and to give attendees the chance to take more than one course. We ran the following seven workshops:

Recreating the In-Person Experience

We recreated as much of the in-person experience as possible with attendee networking sessions, the speaker walk-on songs and fun facts, abundant prizes and giveaways, the Twitter contest, an art auction, and happy hours. In addition to all of this, we mailed conference programs, hex stickers, and other swag to each attendee (in the U.S.), along with discount codes from our Vibe Sponsors, MatchaBar, Westland Distillery and Bruichladdich Distillery.

Thank you, Lander Analytics Team!

Even though it was virtual, there was a lot of work that went into the conference, and I want to thank my amazing team at Lander Analytics along with our producer, Bill Prickett, for making it all come together. 

Looking Forward to D.C. and Dublin
If you attended, we hope you had an incredible experience. If you did not, we hope to see you at the virtual DC R Conference in the fall, and at the first Dublin R Conference and the NYR next year!

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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.

Data scientists and R enthusiasts gathered for the 5th annual New York R Conference held on May 9th-11th. In front of a crowd of more than 300 attendees, 24 speakers gave presentations on topics ranging from deep learning and building packages in R to football and hockey analytics.

Speakers included: Andrew Gelman, Emily Robinson, Max Kuhn, Dan Chen, Jared Lander, Namita Nandakumar, Mike Band, Soumya Kalra, Brooke Watson, David Madigan, Jacqueline Nolis, Heather Nolis, Gabriela Hempfling, Wes McKinney, Noam Ross, Jim Savage, Ludmila Janda, Emily Dodwell, Michelle Gill, Krista Watts, Elizabeth Sweeney, Adam Chekroud, Amanda Dobbyn and Letisha Smith.

This year marked the ten-year anniversary of the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup. It has been incredible to see the growth of meetup over the years. We now have over 10,000 members around the world!

Members Over Time

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from the conference:

Jonah Gabry Kicked Off “R” Week at the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup with a Talk on Using Stan in R

Jonah Gabry kicking off R Week with a talk about the Stan ecosystem

Jonah Gabry from the Stan Development Team kicked off “R” week with a talk on making Bayes easier in the R ecosystem. Jonah went over the packages (rstanarm, rstantools, bayesplot and loo) which emulate other R model-fitting functions, unify function naming across Stan-based R packages, and develop plotting functions using ggplot objects.

50 Conference Attendees Participated in Pre-Conference Workshops on Thursday before the Conference

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People learning about machine learning from Max Kuhn during the pre-conference workshops

On the Thursday before the two-day conference, more than 50 conference attendees arrived at Work-Bench a day early for a full day of workshops. This was the first year of the R Conference Workshop Series. Max Kuhn, Dan Chen, Elizabeth Sweeney and Kaz Sakamoto each led a workshop which covered the following topics:

  • Machine Learning with Caret (Max Kuhn)
  • Git for Data Science (Dan Chen)
  • Introduction to Survival Analysis (Elizabeth Sweeney)
  • Geospatial Statistics and Mapping in R (Kaz Sakamoto)

The Growth of R-Ladies Summed Up in Three Pictures…

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We are so excited to see the growth of the R-Ladies community and we appreciate their support for the NY R Conference over the years. Congratulations ladies!

Dr. Andrew Gelman Delivers Keynote Speech on the Fallacy of P-Values and Thinking like a Statistician—All Without Slides

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Andrew Gelman wowing the crowd as usual

There wasn’t a soul in the crowd who wasn’t hanging on every word from Columbia professor Dr. Andrew Gelman. The only speaker with a 40-minute time slot, and the only speaker to not use slides, Dr. Gelman talked about life as a statistician, warned of the perils of p-values and stressed the importance of simulation—before data collection—to improve our understanding of possible real-life scenarios. “Only through simulating fake data, can you really have statistical confidence about whatever performance metric you’re aiming for,” Gelman noted.

While we try not to pick a favorite speaker, Dr. Gelman runs away with that title every time he comes to speak at the New York R Conference.

Jacqueline and Heather Nolis Taught Us to Not to Be Afraid of Deep Learning and Model Deployment in Production

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Jacqueline Nolis showing how fun and easy deep learning can be

The final talk on day one was perhaps the most entertaining and insightful from the weekend. Jacqueline Nolis taught us how developing a deep learning model is easier than we thought and how humor can help us understand a complex idea in a simple form. Our top five favorite neural network-generate pet names: Dia, Spok, Jori, Lule, and Timuse!

On Saturday morning, Heather Nolis showed us how we can deploy the model into production. Heather walked through the steps involved in preparing an R model for production using containers (Docker) and container orchestration (Kubernetes) to share models throughout an organization or for the public. How can we put a model into production without your laptop running 24/7? By running the code safely on a server in the cloud!

Emily Robinson and Honey Berk Win Headphones for Most Tweets During the Conference

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Emily Robinson winning the tweeting grand prize

If you’re not following Emily Robinson (@robinson_es) and Honey Berk (@honeyberk), you’re missing out! Emily and Honey led all conference attendees in Twitter mentions according to our Twitter scorekeeper Malorie Hughes (@data_all_day). Because of Emily and Honey’s presence on Twitter, those who were unable to attend the conference were able to follow along with all of our incredible speakers throughout the two-day event.

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Tweet stats dashboard created by Malorie Hughes

Jared Lander Debuts New-Born R Package Hex Sticker T-Shirts: Congratulations to Jared and Rebecca on the Birth of their Son, Lev

Baby themed hex sticker shirts designed by Vivian Peng

During my talk I debuted a custom R package hex sticker t-shirt with my wife Rebecca and son Lev. We R a very nerdy family.

Looking Forward to 2020

If you attended the 2019 New York R Conference, we hope you had an incredible experience. If you did not attend the conference, we hope to see you next year!

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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.

Baby Hex Stickers

Members Over Time

Ten years ago Josh Reich held the first ever New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup at Union Square Ventures. Back then it was called the New York R Meetup and 21 people RSVP’d. I discovered the Meetup three months later thanks to Andrew Gelman’s blog and by then the RSVP count had doubled and Drew Conway became a co-organizer. The experience was so much fun and I learned a lot of good stuff. I remember learning about the head() and tail() functions, wishing I learned them in grad school.

Early Meetup
The crowd at an early meetup fit in a small room at Columbia with room to spare.

I started attending regularly and pretty soon Drew decided to serve pizza which later led to years of pizza data. He also designed a logo for the NYC Data Mafia, which made for a great t-shirt that we still sell. One time, a number of us were talking and realized we were all answering each other’s questions on StackOverflow. Our community was growing both in person and online. I fell in love with the group because it was a great place to learn and hang out with smart, welcoming people.

During the first two years our hosts included NYU, Columbia, AOL and a handful of others. At this time there were about 1,800 members with Drew as the sole organizer who was ready to focus on other parts of his life, so he asked Wes McKinney and me to take over as organizers. This was after Drew renamed the group the Open Statistical Programming Meetup as to include other open source languages like Python, Julia, Go and SQL. I was incredibly thrilled to organize this group which meant so much to me.

Over the next eight years our numbers swelled to almost 11,000 with members and speakers coming from all over the world. We have held the Meetup at places such as eBay, AT&T, iHeartRadio, Work-Bench, Knewton, Twitter, New York Presbyterian, Rise New York and Google. The most popular event welcomed nearly 400 people when Hadley Wickham spoke in September of 2015, the only time the Meetup met on a Friday.

Hadley, Becky and Jared
The Meetup’s most popular night featured Hadley Wickham and coincided with my fifth date with Rebecca Martin, my future wife.

That night was also my fifth date with Rebecca Martin. We originally met during Michael Kane’s talk about PubMed then reconnected about a year later. We went on to get married and have a kid together. The New York Times used the nerdiest closing line ever for our wedding announcement: “The couple met in New York in May 2014 at a meet-up about statistical programming organized by the groom.”

Baby Hex Stickers
Rebecca and I recently added a new R programmer to our family and celebrated with baby-themed hex sticker shirts.

The Meetup has grown not only in numbers but in reach as well. There’s a website hosting all of the presentations, we livestream the Meetups and people from all over the world chat in our Slack team. Our live events include an ongoing workshop series and conferences in New York and Washington DC, which just hit their fifth anniversary, all for building and supporting the community and open source software.

NY R Conference
The crowd at the New York R Conference.

These past ten years have been a collection of amazing experiences for me where I got to learn from some of the world’s best experts and develop lasting relationships with great people. This community means so much to me and I very much look forward to its continued growth over the next decade.

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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.

After four sold-out years in New York City, the R Conference made its debut in Washington DC to a sold-out crowd of data scientists at the Ronald Reagan Building on November 8th & 9th. Our speakers shared presentations on a variety of R-related topics.

A big thank you to our speakers Max Kuhn, Emily Robinson, Mike Powell, Mara Averick, Max Richman, Stephanie Hicks, Michael Garris, Kelly O’Briant, David Smith, Anna Kirchner, Roger Peng, Marck Vaisman, Soumya Kalra, Jonathan Hersh, Vivian Peng, Dan Chen, Catherine Zhou, Jim Klucar, Lizzy Huang, Refael Lav, Ami Gates, Abhijit Dasgupta, Angela Li  and Tommy Jones.

Some of the amazing speakers

Some highlights from the conference:

R Superstars Mara Averick, Roger Peng and Emily Robinson

Mara Averick, Roger Peng and Emily Robinson

A hallmark of our R conferences is that the speakers hang out with all the attendees and these three were crowd favorites.

Michael Powell Brings R to the aRmy

Major Michael Powell

Major Michael Powell describes how R has brought efficiency to the Army Intelligence and Security Command by getting analysts out of Excel and into the Tidyverse. “Let me turn those 8 hours into 8 seconds for you,” says Powell.

Max Kuhn Explains the Applications of Equivocals to Apply Levels of Certainty to Predictions

Max Kuhn

After autographing his book, Applied Predictive Modeling, for a lucky attendee, Max Kuhn explains how Equivocals can be applied to individual predictions in order to avoid reporting predictions when there is significant uncertainty.

NYR and DCR Speaker Emily Robinson Getting an NYR Hoodie for her Awesome Tweeting

Emily Robinson

Emily Robinson tweeted the most at the 2018 NYR conference, winning her a WASD mechanical keyboard and at DCR she came in second so we gave her a limited edition NYR hoodie.

Max Richman Shows How SQL and R can Co-Exist

Max Richman

Max Richman, wearing the same shirt he wore when he spoke at the first NYR, shows parallels between dplyr and SQL.

Michael Garris Tells the Story of the MNIST Dataset

Michael Garris

Michael Garris was a member of the team that built the original MNIST dataset, which set the standard for handwriting image classification in the early 1990s. This talk may have been the first time the origin story was ever told.

R Stats Luminary Roger Peng Explains Relationship Between Air Pollution and Public Health

Roger Peng

Roger Peng shows us how air pollution levels has fallen over the past 50 years resulting in dramatic improvements in air quality and health (with help from R).

Kelly O’Briant Combining R with Serverless Computing

Kelly O'Briant

Kelly O’Briant demonstrates how to easily deploy R projects on Google Compute Engine and promoted the new #radmins hashtag.

Hot Dog vs Not Hot Dog by David Smith (Inspired by Jian-Yang from HBO’s Silicon Valley)

David Smith

David Smith, one of the original R users, shows how to recreate HBO’s Silicon Valley’s Not Hot Dog app using R and Azure

Jon Hersh Describes How to Push for Data Science Within Your Organization

Jon Hersh

Jon Hersh discusses the challenges, and solutions, of getting organizations to embrace data science.

Vivian Peng and the Importance of Data Storytelling

Vivian Peng

Vivian Peng asks the question, how do we protect the integrity of our data analysis when it’s published for the world to see?

Dan Chen Signs His Book for David Smith

Dan Chen and David Smith

Dan Chen autographing a copy of his book, Pandas for Everyone, for David Smith. Now David Smith has to sign his book, An Introduction to R, for Dan.

Malorie Hughes Analyzing Tweets

Malorie Hughes

On the first day I challenged the audience to analyze the tweets from the conference and Malorie Hughes, a data scientist with NPR, designed a Twitter analytics dashboard to track the attendee with the most tweets with the hashtag #rstatsdc. Seth Wenchel won a WASD keyboard for the best tweeting. And we presented Malorie wit a DCR speaker mug.

Strong Showing from the #RLadies!

The R-Ladies

The #rladies group is growing year after year and it is great seeing them in force at NYR and DCR!

Packages

Matthew Hendrickson, a DCR attendee, posted on twitter every package mentioned during the two-day conference: tidyverse, tidycensus, leaflet, leaflet.extras, funneljoin, glmnet, xgboost, rstan, rstanarm, LowRankQP, dplyr, coefplot, bayesplot, keras, tensorflow, lars, magrittr, purrr, rsample, useful, knitr, rmarkdown, ggplot2, ggiraph, ggrepel, ggraph, ggthemes, gganimate, ggmap, plotROC, ggridges, gtrendsr, tlnise, tm, Bioconductor, plyranges, sf, tmap, textmineR, tidytext, gmailr, rtweet, shiny, httr, parsnip, probably, plumber, reprex, crosstalk, arules and arulesviz.

Data Community DC

Data Community DC

A special thanks to the Data Community DC for helping us make the DC R Conference an incredible experience.

Videos

The videos for the conference will be posted in the coming weeks to dc.rstats.ai.

See You Next Year

Looking forward to more great conferences at next year’s NYR and DCR!

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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.

2018 New York R Conference

The 2018 New York R Conference was the biggest and best yet. This is both in terms of the crowd size and content.  The speakers included some of the R community’s best such as Hadley Wickham, David Robinson, Jennifer Hill, Max Kuhn, Andreas Mueller (ok, a little Python), Evelina Gabasova, Sean Taylor and Jeff Ryan. I am proud to say we were almost at gender parity for both attendees and speakers which is amazing for a tech conference. Brooke Watson even excitedly noted that we had a line for the women’s room.

Particularly gratifying for me was seeing so many of my students speak. Eurry Kim, Dan Chen and Alex Boghosian all gave excellent talks.

Some highlights that stuck out to me are:

Emily Robinson Shows There is More to the Tidyverse than Hadley

The Expanded Tidyverse

Emily Robinson, otherwise known as ERob, gave an excellent talk showing how the Tidyverse is so much more than just Hadley and that there are many people inspired by him to contribute in the Tidy way.

Sean Taylor Forecasted the Future with Prophet

Sean Taylor

Sean Taylor, former New Yorker and unrepentant Eagles fan, demonstrate his powerful R and Python, package Prophet, for forecasting time series data. Facebook open sourced his work so we could all benefit.

OG Data Mafia Founder Drew Conway Popped In

Giving away a data mafia shirt

A lucky fan got an autographed NYC Data Mafia t-shirt from Drew Conway.

David Smith Playing Minecraft Through R

Minecraft in R

David Smith played Minecraft through R, including building objects and moving through the world.

Evelina Gabasova Used Social Network Analysis to Break Down Star Wars

It's a Trap

Evelina Gabasova wowed the audience with her fun talk and detailed analysis of character interaction in Star Wars.

Dusty Turner Represented West Point

Dusty Talking Army Sports

Dusty Turner taught us how the United States Military Academy uses R for both student instruction and evaluation.

Hadley Wickham Delved into the Nitty Gritty of R

Hadley shows off objects are stored in memory

Hadley Wickham showed us how to get into the internals of R and figure out how to examine objects from a memory perspective.

Jennifer Hill Demonstrated Awesome Machine Learning Techniques for Causal Inference

Jennifer Hill Explaining Causal Inference

Following her sold-out meetup appearance in March, Jennifer continued to push the boundaries of causal inference.

I Made the Authors of Caret and scitkit-learn Show That R and Python Can Get Along

Caret and Scikit-learn in one place

While both Andreas and Max gave great individual talks, I made them pose for this peace-making photo.

David Robinson Got the Upper Hand in a Sibling Twitter Duel

DRob Teaching

Given only about 30 minutes notice, David put together an entire slideshow on how to livetweet and how to compete with your sibling.

In the End Emily Robinson Beat Her Brother For Best Tweeting

Emily won the prize for best tweeting

Despite David’s headstart Emily was the best tweeter (as calculated by Max Kuhn and Mara Averick) so she won the WASD Code mechanical keyboard with MX Cherry Clear switches.

Silent Auction of Data Paintings

The Robinson Family bought the Pizza Data painting for me

Thomas Levine made paintings of famous datasets that we auctioned off with the proceeds supporting the R Foundation and the Free Software Foundation. The Robinson family very graciously chipped in and bought the painting of the Pizza Poll data for me! I’m still floored by this and in love with the painting.

Ice Cream Sandwiches

Ice Cream Sandwiches

In addition to bagels and eggs sandwiches from Murray’s Bagels, Israeli food from Hummus and Pita Company, avocado toast and coffee from Bluestone Lane Coffee and pizza from Fiore’s, we also had ice creams sandwiches from World’s Best Cookie Dough.

All the Material

To catch up on all the presentations check out Mara Averick’s excellent notes:

Or check out all of Brooke’s drawings, collated by Dan Chen.

Videos and Upcoming Events

The videos will be posted at rstats.nyc in a few weeks for all to enjoy.

There are a number of other events coming up including:

We are already beginning plans for next year’s conference and are working on bringing it to DC as well! Stay tuned for all that and more.

Dan loves his mug

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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.