R / Pharma and R / Medicine, two new R Consortium sponsored conferences that appeared in 2018, are both grass roots, community-level manifestations of fundamental trends driving the growth of R. R / Pharma organized as an R Consortium working group by R users at several prominent pharmaceutical companies demonstrated that R has reached sufficient critical mass in Pharma to be recognized as a technology important enough to explore inter-company cooperation, while the addition of Genetech/Roche to R Consortium shows the commitment of upper level management to migrate from SAS to R. – At the other, non-corporate end of the spectrum, the R / Medicine conference was well attended by practicing clinicians coming to R, and in some cases statistics and data analysis, for the first time in order to move forward with the practice of data driven medicine. – In this talk, I will present some highlights from these conferences, and other related R Consortium initiatives, describe some of the R-based projects that illustrate the kind of work being done, and indicate what to expect this year.
Joseph is RStudio’s “Ambassador at Large” for all things R, editor of the R Views blog, and RStudio’s representative on the R Consortium’s board of directors. Joseph came to RStudio via Revolution Analytics and Microsoft where he was a data scientist, blogger and community manager. Before joining Revolution Analytics Joseph worked as a statistician for a small healthcare economics consulting firm, and before that he held a variety of technical, marketing and sales positions while working for startups that spanned multiple industries including government contracting, local area networks, disk drives and test equipment. Joseph studied Classics and Mathematics as an undergraduate at Franklin & Marshall College and earned an M.A. in Humanities and an M.S. in Statistics from the California State University.
