I loved the useR 2016 conference, and here’s why: though I am not a statistician, and I have never programmed in R, I found my first time at this yearly geekfest of R-ficionados to be a friendly, accessible, and instructive event.
Our program in Data-Driven Discovery focuses on supporting the people and practice of data science for natural science research. Many of the people we support use R, and many others create new approaches to leveraging data for new discoveries through developing new R packages and programs. So it was really about time that one of us here dive into the community of practitioners. It was illuminating.
First off, this was one of the friendliest technology conferences I have ever attended. The normal culture of these kinds of events is lots of looking at your shoes, peering into your phone, or simply plugged into your laptop working. While there was some of that here too, the breaks and meals were noteworthy in that people introduced themselves, discussed the day’s sessions, or just talked shop around R and stats. It was amazingly easy to break the ice with new people, almost as if useR had its own special culture of meeting new people, built-in.
The tenor of conversation was non-dogmatic. This was an entire conference dedicated to one language, filled to the brim with statisticians, and yet there was an openness to discussing other languages, what other non-R technology they liked, and how R fit within the larger ecosystem of tools. It was refreshing.
Though I am sure they will release stats on this soon, my sense is that there was a higher than usual level of diversity at this useR conference. I’d estimate about 25-35 percent women attendees, speakers, and 33 percent of the keynotes. OK, so these are not perfect numbers in the absolute, yet compared to your average tech or computer science conference, it is trending in a better direction. It also seemed that though stats was the dominant discipline, there were a significant number of other research disciplines represented, and certainly the academic/industry split was pretty healthy.
Also, I <heart> #rcatladies, and not just because they now have a hexagon sticker like all the cool kids. It helps to have something like this to bring attention to diversity at a technology conference. Also, cats. (Listen to this Not So Standard Deviations podcast that explains the origins of #rcatladies).
Lastly, I loved useR 2016 because the keynotes were as informative as they were compelling. Think back to the last time you attended a conference where most of the keynotes were worth attending and actually warranted paying attention. At useR all of the keynotes I attended were good: not only did they have R-oyalty like Hadley Wickham of RStudio, but also researchers like Deborah Nolan and Daniela Witten, as well as a surprise appearance by Stanford’s Don Knuth, creator of TeX, speaking on literate programming.
Literate programming actually turned out to be an unexpectedly great idea for this conference. Though it is a relatively old topic, first published about by Knuth in the early 1980's, it combines the correctness of mathematical thinking with a practical solution for even modern challenges of reproducible research and code. In short, write code for humans to understand, not just the compiler.
Old things are new again. Stats and Data Science.
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Thank you for sharing.