The inaugural Government & Public Sector R Conference took place virtually from December 2nd to December 4th. With over 240 attendees, 26 speakers, three panelists and a rum masterclass class leader, the R|Gov conference was a place where data scientists could gather remotely to explore, share, and inspire ideas.

We had so many amazing speakers, whom we would like to thank: Lucy D’Agostino McGowan (Wake Forest University), Dr. Andrew Gelman (Columbia University), Dr. Graciela Chichilnisky (Global Thermostat), Dr. David Meza (NASA), Maj. Maxine Drake (US Army), Alex Gold (RStudio), Kimberly F. Sellers (Georgetown University; The U. S. Census Bureau), Dr. Tyler Morgan-Wall (Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA)), Imane El Idrissi & Dr. Anna Mantsoki (Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics), Dr. Wendy Martinez (Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)), Col. Alfredo Corbett (US Air Force), Rose Martinez & Brooke Frye (New York City Council Data Team), Yvan Gauthier (Department of National Defence), Michael Jadoo (BLS), Tommy Jones (In-Q-Tel), Selina Carter (IDB), Refael Lav (Deloitte’s Federal Government Services teams), Dr. Abhijit Dasgupta (Zansors), Dr. Simina Boca (Georgetown University Medical Center), Dr. Wil Doane (IDA), Mo Johnson-León (Insight Lane), Dan Chen (Virginia Tech), Dr. Gwynn Sturdevant (HBS & R-Ladies DC), Marck Vaisman (Microsoft), Jonathan Hersh (Argyros School of Business), Kaz Sakamoto (Lander Analytics & Columbia University), Emily Martinez (NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene), Dan Whitenack (SIL International & Practical AI Podcast), Danya Murali (Arcadia Power), Malcolm Barrett (Teladoc Health) and myself.

All the talks will be shared on rstats.ai and the Lander Analytics YouTube channel in the very near future. Stay tuned!

Check out some of the highlights from the conference:

Graciela Chichilnisky explains how financial instruments can resolve climate change

One of my former professors at Columbia University, Dr. Graciela Chichilnisky, gave a presentation on how financial instruments can resolve climate change quickly and effectively by using existing capital markets to benefit high—and, especially, low—income groups. The process Dr. Chichilnisky proposes is simple and can lead to a transformation of our capitalistic economy in the direction of human survival. Furthermore, it is realistic and is profitable. Dr. Chichilnisky acted as the lead U.S. author on the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, which received the 2007 Nobel Prize for its work in deciding world policy with respect to climate change, and she worked extensively on the Kyoto Protocol, creating and designing the carbon market that became international law in 2005. 

Another classic no-slides talk from Andrew Gelman on how his team and The Economist Magazine built a presidential election forecasting model

Another professor of mine, Andrew Gelman told us he wanted to give a talk on how his team’s election forecasting succeeded brilliantly, failed miserably, or landed somewhere in between. To build the model, they combined national polls, state polls, and political and economic fundamentals. Because we didn’t know the results of the election at the time, he didn’t know which of the three he’d be talking about… So how did his election forecast perform? The model predicted 49 out of 50 states correctly… But that doesn’t mean the forecast was perfect… For some background, see this article.

Wendy Martinez inspires and shares lessons about the rocky road she traveled to using R at a U.S. Government agency

Wendy Martinez described some of her experiences — both successes and failures — using R at several U.S. government agencies. In addition to serving as the Director of the Mathematical Statistics Research Center at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the last eight years, she is currently the President of the American Statistical Association (ASA), and she also served in several research positions throughout the Department of Defense. She has also written two books on MATLAB! It’s nice to see that she switched to open source.

Colonel Alfredo Corbett Spoke On Air Combat Command Enterprise Data Improvements

Deputy Director of Communications of the United States Air Force Colonel Alfedo Corbett showed us why, in his work, data can be a warfighting asset, fundamental to how Air Combat Command (ACC) operates in—and supports—all domains of warfare. In coordination with the Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force, ACC is working to improve its data governance, data architecture, data standards, and data talent & culture, implementing major improvements to the way it manages, acquires, ingests, stores, processes, exploits, analyzes, and delivers data to its almost 100,000 operators.

We Participated in Two Virtual Happy Hours!

At lunch on the first day of the conference, we took a dive into the history and distillation process of a legendary rum made at the longest continuously running distillery in the world, Mount Gay Brand Ambassador Darrio Prescod shared his knowledge and transported us to Barbados (where he tuned in from virtually). Following the second day of the conference, members of the Mount Gay brand development team took us through a rum tasting and shook up a couple of cocktails. Attendees and speakers listened and hung out, drinking rum, matcha, soda or water during our virtual happy hour.

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

The A(R)T Auction was held in support of the  R Foundation, featuring pieces by artists in the R Community. Artists included Nadieh Bremer (left), Selina Carter, Thomas Lin Pedersen (right), Will Chase, DiKayo Data.

Traditional R-Ladies Group Photo Happened Again

We took an R-Ladies group [virtual] selfie. We would like to note that more R-Ladies participated, but chose not to share video.:

Jon Harmon, Selina Carter, Mayarí Montes de Oca & DiKayo Data win Raspberry Pis, Noise Cancelling Headphones, and Gaming Mechanical Keyboards for Most Active Tweeting
You can see the R|Gov 2020 R Shiny Scoreboard here! A custom started at DCR 2018 by our Twitter scorekeeper Malorie Hughes (@data_all_day), has returned every year by popular demand. Congratulations to our winners!

52 Conference Attendees Participated in Pre-Conference Workshops

We ran the following workshops prior to the conference:

Moving from DCR to R|Gov
With the shift to remote, we realized we could welcome a global audience to our annual conference, as we did for the virtual New York R Conference in August. And that gave birth to R|Gov, the Government and Public Sector R Conference. This new industry-focused conference focused on work in government, defense, NGOs and the public sector, and we have speakers from not only the DC-area, but also from Geneva, Switzerland, Nashville, Tennessee, Quebec, Canada and Los Angeles, California. For next year, we are working to invite speakers from more levels of government–local, state and federal. You can read more about this choice here.

Like NYR, R|Gov featured many in-person components of the gathering, like networking sessions, speaker walk-on songs and fun facts, happy hours, lots of giveaways, the Twitter contest, and the auction.

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 New York, R|Gov, and Dublin!

If you attended, we hope you had an incredible experience. If you did not attend this year’s conference, we hope to see you at the at the New York R Conference and R|Gov in 2021, and, soon, the first Dublin R Conference.

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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.