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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/07/user-2018-recap.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p>he fourteenth annual worldwide R user conference, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-project.org/conferences.html" target="_blank">useR!2018</a>, was held last week in Brisbane, Australia and it was an outstanding success. The conference attracted around 600 users from around the world and — as the first held in the Southern hemisphere — brought many first-time conference-goers to useR!. (There were also a number of beginning R users as well, judging from the attendance at the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmqxVDlfKQY" target="_blank">beginner's tutorial</a> hosted by R-Ladies.) The program included 19 3-hour <a rel="nofollow" href="https://user2018.r-project.org/tutorials/" target="_blank">workshops</a>, 6 keynote presentations, and more than 200 <a rel="nofollow" href="https://user2018.r-project.org/schedule/" target="_blank">contributed talks</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://user2018.r-project.org/lightning/" target="_blank">lightning talks</a> and <a rel="nofollow" href="https://user2018.r-project.org/poster/" target="_blank">posters</a> on using, extending, and deploying R.</p>
<p>If you weren't able to make it to Brisbane, you can nonetheless relive the experience thanks to the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_R5smHVXRYGhZYDJsnXTwg/videos" target="_blank">recorded videos</a>. Almost all of the tutorials, keynotes and talks are available to view for free, courtesy of the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-consortium.org/" target="_blank">R Consortium</a>. (A few remain to be posted, so keep an eye on the channel.) Here are a few of my personal highlights, based on talks I saw in Brisbane or have managed to catch online since then.</p>
<h3>Keynote talks</h3>
<p>Steph de Silva, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27FxbDtCFoc" target="_blank">Beyond Syntax: on the power and potentiality of deep open source communities</a>. A moving look at how open source communities, and especially R, grow and evolve.</p>
<p>Bill Venables, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNCD5g-wI9U" target="_blank">Adventures with R</a>. It was wonderful to see the story and details behind an elegantly designed experiment investigating spoken language, and this example was used to great effect to contrast the definitions of &quot;Statistics&quot; and &quot;Data Science&quot;. Bill also includes the best piece advice to give anyone joining a specialized group: &quot;Everyone here is smart; distinguish yourself by being kind&quot;.</p>
<p>Kelly O'Brian's <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1yYu-MmgJw" target="_blank">short history of RStudio</a> was an interesting look at the impact of RStudio (the IDE and the company) on the R ecosystem.   </p>
<p>Thomas Lin Pedersen, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21ZWDrTukEs" target="_blank">The Grammar of Graphics</a>. A really thought-provoking talk about the place of animations in the sphere of data visualization, and an introduction to the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/thomasp85/gganimate" target="_blank">gganimate package</a> which extends ggplot2 in a really elegant and powerful way.</p>
<p>Danielle Navarro, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFkEbYk0C0Q" target="_blank">R for Pysychological Science</a>. A great case study in <a rel="nofollow" href="http://compcogscisydney.org/learning-statistics-with-r/" target="_blank">introducing statistical programming to social scientists</a>.</p>
<p>Roger Peng, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5033jBHFiHE&feature=youtu.be%C2%A0https://simplystatistics.org/2018/07/12/use-r-keynote-2018/" target="_blank">Teaching R to New Users</a>. A fascinating history of the R project, and how changes in the user community have been reflected in changes in programming frameworks. The <a rel="nofollow" href="https://simplystatistics.org/2018/07/12/use-r-keynote-2018/" target="_blank">companion essay</a> summarizes the talk clearly and concisely.</p>
<p>Jenny Bryan, Code Smells. This was an amazing talk with practical recommendations for better R coding practices. The video isn't online yet, but the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://speakerdeck.com/jennybc/code-smells-and-feels" target="_blank">slides are available</a> to view online.</p>
<h3>Contributed talks</h3>
<p>Bryan Galvin, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLKky1xIxtc" target="_blank">Moving from Prototype to Production in R, a look inside the machine learning infrastructure at Netflix</a>. Who says R doesn't scale?</p>
<p>Peter Dalgaard, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1vTSdRolgI" target="_blank">What's in a Name</a>? The secrets of the R build and release process, and the story behind their codenames.</p>
<p>Martin Maechler, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bu7QUxzIbA" target="_blank">Helping R to be (even more) Accurate</a>. On R's near-obsessive attention to the details of computational accuracy.</p>
<p>Rob Hyndman, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MemnYSGeJ34" target="_blank">Tidy Forecasting in R</a>. The next generation of time series forecasting methods in R. </p>
<p>Nicholas Tierney, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA8ItKmdwjM" target="_blank">Maxcovr: Find the best locations for facilities using the maximal covering location problem</a>. Giftastic!</p>
<p>David Smith <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Kyp4cb7wk" target="_blank">Speeding up computations in R with parallel programming in the cloud</a>. My talk on the doAzureParallel package.</p>
<p>David Smith, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_wOnvS1WcA" target="_blank">The Voice of the R Community</a>. My talk for the R Consortium with the <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/downloads/Voice%20of%20R%20Community.pdf" target="_blank">results of their community survey</a>.</p>
<p>In addition, several of my colleagues from Microsoft were in attendance (Microsoft was a proud Platinum sponsor of useR!2018) and delivered talks of their own:</p>
<p>Hong Ooi, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcbKRJ3QLVQ" target="_blank">SAR: a practical, rating-free hybrid recommender for large data</a></p>
<p>Angus Taylor, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybvONalUorM" target="_blank">Deep Learning at Scale with Azure Batch AI</a></p>
<p>Miguel Fierro, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKcL9Y83YgE" target="_blank">Spark on Demand with AZTK</a></p>
<p>Fang Zhou, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNx6IUvJ1wg" target="_blank">Jumpstart Machine Learning with Pre-Trained Models</a></p>
<p>Le Zhang, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbHCtUSnN8o" target="_blank">Build scalable Shiny applications for employee attrition prediction on Azure cloud</a></p>
<h3>Looking back, looking ahead</h3>
<p>Overall, I thought useR!2018 was a wonderful conference. Great talks, friendly people, and impeccably organized. Kudos to all of the organizing committee, and particularly Di Cook, for putting together such a fantastic event. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.user2019.fr/" target="_blank">Next year's conference</a> will be held in Toulouse, France and already has a great set of keynote speakers announced. But in the meantime, you can catch up on the talks from useR!2018 at the R Consortium YouTube channel linked below.</p>
<p>YouTube: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_R5smHVXRYGhZYDJsnXTwg/videos" target="_blank">R Consortium</a></p>
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