Why R? is one of the best opportunities to learning secrets of data science from true experts. This year we are happy to invite you for six keynote presentations, one invited workshop and eight regular workshops.

About the Why R? 2019 conference

We are more than happy to announce that Why R? 2019 Conference will be organized by Why R? Foundation. The third official meeting of Polish R enthusiasts will be held in Warsaw 26-29 September 2019. As the meeting is held in English, we are happy to invite R users from other countries.

• Website
• Facebook fanpage and the event
• Twitter

Keynote speakers

• Steph Locke (Locke Data): with the increased importance of machine learning, we are becoming more and more concerned about the ethics of data science. Steph will tell us why the ethical development of machine learning models matters and how to ensure it.
• Marvin Wright (Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology): the main developer of the ranger package, the fastest implementation of random forests in R, will talk about intricacies of this machine learning technique, espcially tuning.
• Paula Brito (Universiy of Porto): multidimensional complex data, also known as symbolic data is often too complied for classical statistical methods. Paula Brito, a researcher in the field of the symbolic data analysis, will present her multivariate analysis methodologies implemented in the newest version of her package, MAINT.Data.
• Jakub Nowosad (Adam Mickiewicz University): R is well-known for its wide array of geostatistic tools. Jakub Nowosad, a co-author of the Geocomputation with R, will share with us his knowledge on the best practices in the geographic data analysis.
• Sigrid Keydana (RStudio): since the arrival of the tensorflow package, R is opened to the number of applications offered by deep learning. Sigrid Keydana, will present in-depth on how to use the tfprobability package to assess uncertainties of the probabilistic model, including deep neural networks.
• Wit Jakuczyn (WLOG Solutions): R is popular in business applications. Wit will present challenges and solutions that appear nowadays during the cooperation with business related organizations.

Workshops

Invited workshop

Introduction to modern Generalized Additive Models in R: Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) GAMs are powerful enough to be a cornerstone of the Prophet software developed by Facebook. Matteo Fasiolo (University of Bristol), an author of two popular GAM-related R packages, will teach how to utilize these models to their full potential.

Regular Workshops

Workshops take around 3 hours and happen in the morning or afternoon session.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) path:

This path focuses on tools used in the interpretative machine learning to understand decisions made by our models.

• auditor + DALEX: a powerful duet for validation and explanation of machine learning models
  • Alicja Gosiewska (Warsaw University of Technology, maintainer of the auditor package) and Tomasz Mikołajczyk will hold an introductory workshop about XAI in R. The workshop will mostly focus on tools from the DrWhy (drwhy.ai) universe.
• „Black is the new White” – using eXplainable Artificial Intelligence in Business
  • Marcin Chlebus (University of Warsaw) will guide participants of his workshop through the variety of XAI-related packages in R focusing on the business applications

Regular Workshops

• Straightforward introduction to Deep Learning in R (with Keras) Mikołaj Olszewski and Mikołaj Bogucki iDash
• Shiny Basics Theo Roe, Jumping Rivers
• To be announaced
• data.table introduction & time-series Jan Gorecki, H2O.AI
• Speeding up R wih C++ (Rcpp) – from basics to more advanced applications Piotr WóJcik, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw
• Potentials of R for data linkage Radmila Velichkovich, University of Neuchatel

Register!

The EARLY Bird registration and workshops submission ended 31.05.2019, however the call for abstracts is still open, until 28.06.2019.

Confirmed speakers will get the entrance for the day of the conference for free and will receive discounts for the rest of the conference and workshops.

Register here

Past events

Why R? 2017 edition, organized in Warsaw, gathered 200 participants. The Facebook reach of the conference page exceeds 15 000 users, with almost 800 subscribers. Our official web page had over 8000 unique visitors and over 12 000 visits in general. To learn more about Why R? 2017 see the conference after movie.

Why R? 2018 edition, organized in Wroclaw, gathered 250 participants. The aftermovie can be found here