It's relatively easy to find the player who has scored the most goals in the last 12 years (hello, Lionel Messi). But which professional football (soccer) player is the best finisher, i.e. which player is most likely to put a shot they take into the goal? You can't simply use the conversion rate (the ratio of shots taken to...
The suite of AzureR packages for interfacing with Azure services from R is now available on CRAN. If you missed the earlier announcements, this means you can now use the install.packages function in R to install these packages, rather than having to install from the Github repositories. Updated versions of these packages will also be posted to CRAN, so...
In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users. R 3.5.2 is now available. Roundup of AI, Machine Learning and Data Science news from December 2018. AzureStor, a new R package to interface with Azure Storage. How to use the "plumber" package to create an R service as a container with...
Last month, I delivered the one-day workshop Practical AI for the Working Software Engineer at the Artificial Intelligence Live conference in Orlando. As the title suggests, the workshop was aimed at developers, bu I didn't assume any particular programming language background. In addition to the lecture slides, the workshop was delivered as a series of Jupyter notebooks. I ran...
R 3.5.2, the latest version of the R language for statistical computation and graphics from the R Foundation, was released today. (This release is codenamed "Eggshell Igloo", likely in reference to this or this Peanuts cartoon.) Compared to R 3.5.1, this update includes only bug fixes, so R scripts and packages compatible with R 3.5.0 or R 3.5.1 should...
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. David Gerard assesses the plausibility of a key plot point in 'Jurassic Park' with simulations in R. In-database R is available in Azure SQL Database for private preview. Introducing AzureR, a new suite of R packages for managing Azure resources in R....
On December 9 2008, very nearly ten years ago, the first post on Revolutions was published. Way back then, this blog was part of a young startup called Revolution Computing, which later became Revolution Analytics. (That name persists to this day in the URL of this blog.) The idea at that time was to introduce the world to a...
Many (if not most) tech communities have far more representation from men than from women (and even fewer from nonbinary folk). This is a shame, because everybody uses software, and these projects would self-evidently benefit from the talent and expertise from across the entire community. Some projects are doing better than others, though, and data scientist Reshama Shaikh recently...
So it turns out that the 1990 Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park is, indeed, a work of fiction. (Personal note: despite the snark to follow, the book is one of my all-time favorites — I clearly remember devouring it in 24 hours straight while ill in a hostel in France.) If the monsters and melodrama didn't give it away,...
Azure SQL Database, the database-as-a-service based on Microsoft SQL Server, now offers R integration. (The service is currently in preview; details on how to sign up for the preview are provided in that link.) While you've been able to run R in SQL Server in the cloud since the release of SQL Server 2016 by running a virtual machine,...
