For the first time in three years, the R community gathered together in person for the annual New York R Conference. It was so wonderful to see so many familiar and new faces across the three-day event, and to connect so many smart people across fields within a similar domain. Without you, our conference does not make it to year 8 as strong as ever.
Watch every talk from the 2022 New York R Conference here → Lander Analytics YouTube channel
Thank you, speakers!
In total, 23 speakers had the opportunity to share their work with conference attendees across the three-day event (one day of workshops; two days of main stage). Let’s take you through a few highlights from notable speakers at this year’s event …
Pictured above from left to right (Top): Jeroen Janssens, Jennifer Hill, Tom Bliss, Molly Huie, Andrew Gelman, Sarah Catanzaro, Max Kuhn (Middle): Hamdan Azhar, Wes McKinney, Jon Keane, Cat Zhou Emil Hvitfeldt, Asmae Toumi, Bernardo Lares, Igor Skokan, Daniel Lee
(Bottom): Mike Band, Ipek Ensari, Matt Heaphy, Stacy Lansey, Jared Lander, Malorie Hughes, Daniel Chen
Check out the best photos → 2022 NYR Photo Gallery
Tom Bliss, National Football League
Ever wonder if athletes reach faster speeds on artificial turf than grass fields? Tom Bliss, a data scientist in the Football Operations department of the National Football League, analyzed player-tracking data from NFL games (using Next Gen Stats technology) to measure whether there was significant difference in top speeds across various playing surfaces. His findings?
There is a slight difference between the top speeds reached between various artificial turf surfaces and natural grass by approximately 0.2-0.4 mph. There is an even more significant drop from turf when compared to natural grass on a baseball field (0.5-0.9 mph), as shown during the games between the Oakland Raiders and opponents when they shared a field with the Oakland A’s at the Oakland Coliseum between 1995 and 2019.
Tom’s team at the NFL helps to provide valuable information to all 32 clubs and the league office pertaining to a wide variety of areas. This includes evaluating the effects of field surfaces so clubs can make the best choice for their team and players, with player health and safety being the top priority.
Jennifer Hill, New York University
Jennifer Hill from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, joined us to share the work done by Jennifer and colleagues to create an auto-ML software, thinkCausal, which leverages the BART algorithm as its foundation to bridge the gap between machine learning and causal inference.
With intuitive processes, running a model and mining for key insights has never been easier. Developments in the BART algorithm, and its relation to the exploratory data analysis pipeline has enabled data scientists, statisticians, and analysts alike to run high-performing modeling architecture with limited code needed.
The thinkCausal application is currently in beta; check it out here: apsta.shinyapps.io/thinkCausal
Andrew Gelman, Columbia University
Only three speakers have given a talk at every New York R Conference since its inception in 2014. Keynote speaker professor Andrew Gelman is one of them. Like always, professor Gelman did not use slides, using his special 40-minute time slot to tell stories of his learners as a statistician throughout his many years studying the domain. His secret? Thinking like a scientist; because it can be costly if you don’t.
“Let me tell you a story,” professor Gelman says to the audience …
The SuperDataScience Podcast Returned For Live Taping
For the second year in a row, the SuperDataScience podcast recorded an episode live on stage to conclude the final day of the NYR conference. This year’s live taping featured an interview with Hilary Mason, Co-Founder and CEO of Hidden Door, who joined host Jon Krohn for a live discussion that explores narrative A.I., emerging ML techniques, how her OSEMN data science process developed, and questions from the audience.
Interactive Workshops
Our in-person and virtual workshops were held on June 8th at Columbia University, featuring four full-day interactive learning opportunities with Max Kuhn, Jeroen Janssens, Dean Attali, Malcolm Barrett and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan, who covered the following topics:
Machine Learning in R with Max Kuhn
Python for R Users with Jeroen Janssens
Building Shiny Apps with Dean Attali
Causal Inference in R with Malcolm Barrett and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan
First Hybrid Conference
We offered both in-person and virtual tickets this year … and what success that was! We loved getting to see the R Community back together again, and to invite those to join us who could not make it to the big city. We gave away physical books, e-books, featured an interactive virtual platform, and offered PLENTY of delicious food and drinks at nearly every minute possible.
A(R)T Auction
What an R Conference without the aRt auction! Art pieces featured in the auction were created by artists in the R Community and all proceeds were donated to the R Foundation. Thank you to our artist Joyce Robbins, Ludmila Janda and Perri Katzman! The highest bidding auction piece was Crafted Distributions by Ludmila Janda for $210.
Thank you to our sponsors!
This conference wouldn’t have been the same without all our wonderful sponsors. We appreciate all of you! Thank you Spring Health, Columbia University | Statistics, R Consortium, RStudio, Saturn Cloud, Springer, Pearson, Chapman & Hall/CRC, Manning, No Starch Press and Sweet Francesca.
Shout out to the Lander Analytics Team!
Like always, my team works incredibly hard to make this event come to life. Thank you, team! For being our first hybrid conference, it takes a lot of coordination to pull it off. I wanted to give a huge shout out to Nicole DelGiudice, who leads the planning and execution of our events.
Great to be back in-person!
It was wonderful to see everyone’s faces in-person (who were able to join us in New York). We love that we had the opportunity to be able to offer a virtual option to those who were not able to attend in-person this year. We will continue doing hybrid conferences, so anyone around the world can attend. We look forward to you seeing what our future events have in store.
We’ll see you next year!
Jared P. Lander
Lander Analytics Chief Data Scientist
All photos by Joshua Cork