Earlier this week, Google hosted the Bay Area useR Group at our San Francisco office. Over 40 attendees showed up to hear Dylan Beaudette from UC Davis give a presentation about investigating soil genesis and geography with R (PDF). Dylan has been using R to study and visualize large amounts of soil data and has made his routines available in the aqp: Algorithms for Quantitative Pedology package on CRAN.

Dylan’s research also utilizes a number of Google technologies, such as Google Earth KMZ overlays of soil data and the Google Ngram Viewer for tracking Temporal Trends in Soil Science Jargon. In addition to open source and soil science, there were lively discussions at the meetup about reproducible research and the data sharing problem.

I’d like to thank our speaker, Dylan, all of the attendees, the Bay Area useR organizers who continue to put together interesting talks each month, and the Google Open Source Program Office for hosting the event. We’re looking forward to the R User Conference in England in August and more local Bay Area Meetups in the interim.

By Murray Stokely, Software Engineer, Infrastructure Quantitative Team