EARL 2016 Review

12 minute read

I was able to attend this year the main R conference in London: EARL.

It is a two day event where it is possible to attend up to 22 speeches. The structure is similar for the two days: speeches by sponsors in the morning kick start the day, followed by three chunks of three speakers.

Among the other review of this event, you can look at Willie’s note.

All in all, it was a great event, with two speeches with a demonstration of using R in a real-time analysis process, a number of new features announced by the Rstudio team and as expected a couple of very technical presentations on operational research.

Day 1, session 1: Sponsors Speeches

Joe Cheng went first and presented the news from Rstudio. The less we can say is that Rstudio had been pretty busy this year, between the release of the flexdashboard, profvis and sparkly package, the new notebook feature in Rstudio and the inclusion of key languages in classic Rmarkdown files(more to come by the Rstudio team). Sparklyr is a package which do the connection between R and spark and allow to use the dplyr functions in a spark core. An handy way to learn Spark for a r user.

The second talk was by David Davis from Microsoft, to whom the best slide goes:

David’s speech was about the maturity of the R ecosystem, debunking the reputation of non-reliability of R.

The next two speakers, members of the R consortium, had buried this assertion by presenting R-hub, a platform to validate R package.

Day 1, Session 2

The first speaker of the morning was Magda , presenting how she help tuned the algorithm behind the customer journey on the Telegraph website.

She presented multiple algorithm tested to recommend articles on the telegraph and the progressive journey to “productionnise” collaborative filtering algorithm.