rstudio::conf kicked off the 2020 season for R conferences last week with record attendance somewhere north of twenty-one hundred. Session topics ranged from business to science, marketing to medicine and attracted R users with very varied backgrounds including DevOps professionals, data scientists, journalists, physicians, statisticians, R package developers, Shiny developers and more. Although it is true that the San Francisco Bay Area is home to a large R Community, and that a great deal of planning and promotion went into making rstudio::conf a success, I don’t think that the enthusiasm and energy that permeated the conference was a local phenomenon. I expect 2020 to be a good year for R conferences worldwide. Here is my short, somewhat eclectic, and by no means complete list of upcoming 2020 R events.

• While not an R specific conference, the Conference on Statistical Practice (Sacramento, February 20 – 22) coming up soon will have some interesting R content. I am particularly looking forward to the talk by Songtao Wang on Thinking Statistically in Social Science and Humanities.
• The NICAR Confererence produced by the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. (New Orleans, March 5 – 8) is a gathering of R and Python savvy journalists using R as an every day tool. Last year, I found the workshops and R training sessions to be outstanding.
• The PAA Annual Meeting (Washington D.C., April 22 – 25) is an opportunity to meet demographers, economists public health professionals and sociologists using R.
• The R Conference New York (May, 7 – 9), the re-branded NY R Conference of previous years, promises to be the major East Coast R event of the year with a diverse and talented roster of speakers.
• The European R Users meeting, eRUM (May, 27 – 30) will be the first major European R conference of the season. Note that Sharon Machlis, Director of Data & Analytics at IDG Communications will be one of the keynote speakers. 2020 may be the year that journalism captures the attention of the R Community.
• The Symposium on Data Science & Statistics, SDSS, (Pittsburgh, June 3 – 6) has become one of my favorite statistics conferences. Smaller and more manageable than the JSM, talks are sure to be infused with R content. Note that there will be a session on Data Journalism and Visualization.
• Now in its twelfth year, R / Finance (Chicago, June 5 – 6) has set the bar for small, single-session, collegial, technical R conferences. Focusing on Financial applications with a serious dose of advanced time series applications, R / Finance provides the opportunity to interact with professionals who put their money on R.
• Always the pivotal event of the R Community, useR! 2020 (St. Louis, July 7 -10) is sure to be a great event and a good time. The final program has not been published (Note that the Call for papers is still open.), but the tutorial sessions alone indicate that useR! 2020 be an outstanding educational opportunity.
  
• The useR! 2020 European Hub Conference (Munich, July 7 – 10) will feature live talks as well as video streaming sessions from useR! 2020 in St. Louis. This innovative format promises to be an important event in its own right and a satisfying community experience.
• The JSM (Philadelphia, August 1 – 6), the mother of all statistical conferences, is expecting more than 6,500 attendees from 52 countries. This is an event you have to train for, but with some preparation and a little planning the JSM can be an opportunity to interact with statisticians who depend on the deep statistical knowledge embedded in R.
• The Bioconductor Conference, BioC 2020, the event where Software and Biology Connect (Boston, July 29 – 30) is the premier conference for R and Genomics. If you have an interest in learning about cutting edge statistical applications using the big data of modern Biology, this the conference to attend.
  
• The Why R? 2020 Conference (Warsaw, August 27 – 30) is not only positioned to be the third significant European R conference of the year, the organizers have developed an ambitious and innovative strategy of supporting a number of satellite pre-meetings that stretch from Warsaw to Limerick and South Africa. I think this is a fantastic community initiative that represents a commitment to build the R Community in under served areas.

• There is no website yet, but it is breaking news that R / Medicine 2020 will be held in Philadelphia from August 27th to 29th. In its third year, R / Medicine is establishing itself as the R conference for physicians seeking to advance clinical practice with R fueled data science.
  
• The LatinR 2020 Conference (Montevideo, October 7 – 9) will be a major South American event. The Call for papers is open. Look here for previous programs.
  
• The BiocAsia 2020 Conference (Beijing, October 17 – 18), the yearly Asian Bioconductor event, has confirmed that Robert Gentleman will be speaking.

Other conferences on my radar are:
* The R Conference Dublin (June)
* The CascadiaRConf (Eugene, OR)
* R / Pharma which will most likely be held at Harvard University in August.
* BioCEurope which will likely be held in December.

Please let me know what upcoming conferences I may have missed by adding them to the comments section of this post.