CambRidge R User Group

Cambridge RSE Seminar Series

Charlie Gao and Thomas Zwagerman

2024-05-09

Introductions

Charlie Gao (Trinity College)
Director, Hibiki AI

Creator of ‘mirai’ framework for parallel and distributed computing in R


Thomas Zwagerman
Research Software Engineer, British Antarctic Survey

Soft Launch

Establish a CambRidge R User Group

  • Access and celebrate deep R talent
  • Forum for sharing valuable experiences
  • Invite top class speakers from around the world
  • Social and professional millieu

1. The R Community

R User Groups Worldwide

  • Registered and sponsored by the R Consortium

R User Groups in the UK

  • Warwick

    • Heather Turner (R Foundation)
    • Martyn Plummer (R-Core)

  • Oxford

    • Brian Ripley (R-Core)

  • London

  • Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow

2. Open Source Developer Community

  • ROpenSci R-universe developer repository

  • Some household names

    • Hadley Wickham

    • Jeroen Ooms

    • Kirill Müller

    • Lionel Henry

    • Winston Chang

    • Joe Cheng

Beyond Async: Shiny / mirai

useR! Conference

Posit::conf

R Project Sprint 2023 @ Warwick

R-Core attendance:

Michael Lawrence, Thomas Lumley, Uwe Ligges, Martin Mächler, Sebastian Meyer, Paul Murrell, Martyn Plummer, Deepayan Sarkar, Luke Tierney, Simon Urbanek

R Dev Days

  • R Dev Day @ Imperial College London (26 April 2024) attached to SatRdays London conference
  • Future satellite events to useR!, posit::conf and RSEcon24

3. R Consortium Projects and Funding

Infrastructure Steering Committee

R Consortium Working Groups

4. R Adoption in Industry

R/Pharma

R/Pharma

Life Sciences

“The integration of TLS into {nanonext} increases the confidence with which {mirai} can be deployed in these powerful environments, accelerating downstream applications and {targets} pipelines.”

5. R Community and RSEs

R Community and RSEs

  • Community Building is part of our job
  • Fits within Research Software Development Principles (Helping your peers)
  • Interactions with “Researchers who code”
  • Promote sustainable software practices, software as a research output, RSE as a career path
  • See The role of the R community in the RSE movement

But I am not an R user…?

  • C/C++: A lot of packages are written in C

  • Python: {reticulate} R interface to Python

  • Growing list of shared tools:

    • Quarto
    • Shiny for Python
    • webR + WebAssembly
    • Shinylive + Pyodide

  • Enables low-barrier collaboration between R and non-R users

CambRidge R User Group

  • Cambridge has a deep pool of R talent
  • Forum for sharing valuable experiences
  • Top class speakers for unique insights
  • Social and professional networking

Thank you!

https://mailchi.mp/68b465855334/cambridge

slides available at https://shikokuchuo.net/cambRidge-rse-seminar