Reflections on EARL London 2016
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The Mango Solutions team have done it again: another excellent Effective Applications of R (EARL) conference just wrapped up here in London. The conference was attended by almost 400 R users from companies all around the world, and was a really fun experience. I was honored to deliver a keynote presentation, alonside keynotes from Joe Cheng and Garrett Grolemund (RStudio), Lou Bajuk (Tibco), Gabor Csardi (R Consortium's R Hub project) and a thought-provoking presentation on machine learning and AI from the Economist's Kenneth Cukier. There was also a fantastic social program, including a dinner inside the 1000-year-old White Tower at the Tower of London. (Many thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring this memorable evening!)
As always though, the focus of the EARL conference is on applications of the R language, and this week's event showcased many real-world uses of R in major companies. Some application highlights include:
- The Financial Times uses R for quantitative journalism
- The British Museum uses R to predict attendance at special exhibitions
- Beazley uses R with SQL Server to analyze insurance data
- Investec's IT department supports R usage for asset management with a standardized suite including RStudio, Revolution R Open and DeployR
- Syngenta uses R to improve global food security
- Maersk uses R to optimize capacity for its shipping lines
- ATASS Sports uses R to predict the probabilty of wins, draws and losses in the UK Premier League
- BCA is using the Azure ML cloud to deploy R models to production
- Microsoft uses R to heat buildings on campus more efficiently
- eBay uses R to quantify the effect and efficiency of TV, radio and print marketing
… and that's just a selection from the talks that I got to see! With three parallel tracks, there were many great talks that I missed, but you can check out the abstracts (with links to slides to come) at the EARL website.
The next EARL Conference will be held in Boston, November 7-9. The call for presentations is still open, so if you have an interesting story to tell about how R is used at your organization, why not come along?
EARL London 2016: Speakers
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