Last month I attended my first ever R User Group meeting, which was held at the University of Portsmouth in their impressive Future Technology Centre. I’d been itching to go to one of these meetups for a while, but unfortunately there was nothing in the South of England, so when this opportunity came around I couldn’t miss it, especially as I couldn’t attend the first one.

It was really well attended by about 30 people from all manner of backgrounds, and two briefs were given. The first was by Andrie de Vries from RStudio who presented on ‘Using TensorFlow and R’ including an overview of neural networks, TensorFlow, and use of the Keras API library, and the second was from Johannes Hechler from the Office for National Statistics on ‘Measuring if we matter’; his initial effort quantifying the impact of statistics produced by the ONS, by counting the number of references in government publications.

Caroline Kovacs did a sterling job organising the event, and Andrie very kindly brought a number of gifts which were distributed randomly as prizes on the evening; the star prize being a copy of ‘R for Data Science’ signed by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund (the holy grail). Astonishingly enough I was randomly chosen to win it, so very many thanks for that!!