In July 2019, the R language programming community gathered in France at the UseR! 2019 conference to plot the future of data. I caught up with Joseph Rickert of the R Consortium in between his talks to get his take on R web apps, data organization, statistical techniques, and more.
In order to identify 2019 R language trends, I asked Joseph about three sources of information on R trends:
- His talk on R Consortium financial grant activities;
- UseR! Keynote topics;
- His talk on R Consortium working group activities.
Experts on the R ecosystem, either at the R Consortium or at the UseR! 2019 speaker selection committee had selected projects or topics for each activity.
Licensing, teaching, package management, validation and diversity improvements
Joseph spoke about the innovative projects that the R Consortium is helping by giving $800,000 in grants. Projects like the RUGS program, R-Ladies, and R-Hub benefit from this support. I learned about the wider scope of R language projects that the R Consortium was funding and identified trends that show the future of R.
Current and future users of R will be able to take advantage of improvements in licensing, teaching, package management, validation, collaboration, and involving women in R. If you want to apply for a grant for your R language project, you can send the R Consortium a proposal.
Workshop: Machine Learning 101++ using Python
Dr. Pieter Buteneers (Chatlayer.ai)
Generative Media – an Emerging Industry.
Xander Steenbrugge(ML6)
Honey Bee Conservation using Deep Learning
Thiago da Silva Alves, Jean Metz (JArchitects)
The R Consortium is in a unique vendor-neutral role to comment on R trends and identify projects that help the larger community. The goals of the consortium are to promote R, support the R Foundation, fund projects to support R language and the R language community, enable the use of R enterprise scale environments and foster collaboration between companies using R.
In my discussions with Joseph Rickert about R community technology and strategic trends, I dug more into his presentation at useR! to help identify areas where R is evolving.
Here’s a partial list of the projects that the R Consortium supports with financial grants.
| Project | Amount Funded by R Consortium |
|---|---|
| Catalyzing R-hub adoption through R package developer advocacy | $46,050 |
| Developing Tools and Templates for Teaching Materials | $10,000 |
| An Earth data processing backend for testing and evaluating stars | $5,000 |
| Forwards Workshops for Women and Girls | $25,000 |
| Future Minimal API: Specification with Backend Conformance Test Suite | $10,000 |
| Joint Profiling of Native and R Code | $11,000 |
| Licensing R – Guidelines and tools | $6,000 |
| Maintaining DBI | $26,500 |
| Next-generation text layout in grid and ggplot2 | $25,000 |
| Ongoing infrastructural development for R on Windows and MacOS | $62,400 |
| Preserving and Transferring Algorithmic Knowledge | $4,000 |
| R Validation Hub | $4,000 |
| Refactoring and updating the SWIG R module | $10,000 |
| serveRless | $10,000 |
| Strengthening of R in support of spatial data infrastructures management : geometa and ows4R R packages | $20,000 |
| Symbolic Formulae for Linear Mixed Models | $6,000 |
| A unified platform for missing values methods and workflows | $10,000 |
In addition to the data on grants that Joseph provided, he also shared information on how the R Consortium provided support for physical R community gatherings to exchange insights and techniques. In the first half of 2019, the R Consortium provided $60,000 in sponsorship for events like SatRday Chicago, New York R Conference, R Cascadia, BioConductor, and useR!
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Interactive web apps, fixing missing data and AI for Good are hot in 2019
Keynote talks at useR! 2019 also provided direction on R language innovation.
Joe Cheng spoke about combining reproducibility with interactivity using Shiny, an R package to build interactive web apps, embed R in Markdown documentation, or build dashboards. Many of talks and tutorials at useR! 2019 included Shiny, showing the growing trend to make data analysis interactive.
Julie Josse gave a keynote talk about R-miss-tastic, a project sponsored by the R Consortium that helps people manage missing data. Julie presented her work on “guessing” the best ways to infer missing data.
Julien Cornebise gave a talk on “AI for Good” and touched on projects done jointly with Amnesty International to detect burned villages on satellite imagery in conflict zones or studies on abuses against women using Twitter data.
Validation, standardized, inclusion and code quality trends
Validation and standardization
Joseph gave another talk on “The Power of Collaboration: ISC Working Groups.” Part of the presentation explained the R Validation Hub which seeks to validate and standardize R Packages. It will be free to use and provide a platform for sharing tests and links to relevant QA information.
Source / Joseph Rickert’s slide deck from his talk The Power of Collaboration: ISC Working Groups
R community diversity and inclusion
The R community is making efforts to support diversity and inclusion. In the short-term, the group is focused on defining and publicizing best practices for R community events. At useR! 2019, there was a prominent code of conduct definition. The stated goal is to provide “a harassment-free conference experience for everyone regardless of gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion (or lack thereof)… Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, conference events, Twitter and other online media.”
Code Coverage Tool for R language
Another interesting working group is the Code Coverage Tool for R. In addition to developing a tool to determine R code coverage when a test suite is executed, the group also promotes the use of code coverage throughout the R ecosystem.
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Summary
The useR! 2019 conference was a great place to get an overview of R trends in 2019. The conference served as a way to gather together a large number of advanced R users and get them to explain real problems they are solving. I gained insight on bigger R trends from the R Consortium’s grants to key projects, UseR keynote topics, and Joseph’s talk on R Consortium working group activities covering validation, licensing, teaching, as well as working groups focused on diversity and code coverage.
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Source : JAXenter
