There's growing awareness that the data we collect, and in particular the variables we include as factors in our predictive models, can lead to unwanted bias in outcomes: from loan applications, to law enforcement, and in many other areas. In some instances, such bias is even directly regulated by laws ... [Read more...]

On Monday, we learned about a serious issue with the installer for Microsoft R Open on Linux-based systems. (Thanks to Norbert Preining for reporting the problem.) The issue was that the installation and de-installation scripts would modify the system shell, and did not use the standard practices to create and ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open 3.5.0 is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux. This update includes the open-source R 3.5.0 engine, which is a major update with many new capabilities and improvements to R. In particular, it includes a major new framework for handling data in R, with some major behind-the-scenes ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. The R Consortium has announced a new round of grants for projects proposed by the R community. A look back at the ROpenSci unconference held in Seattle. Video of my European R Users ... [Read more...]

If you don't get enough joy from publishing scientific papers in your day job, or simply want to experience what it's like to be in a publish-or-perish environment where the P-value is the only important part of a paper, you might want to try StatCheck: the board game where the ... [Read more...]

The R Consortium has just announced its latest round of project grants. After reviewing the proposals submitted by the R community, the Infrastructure Steering Committee has elected to fund the following projects for the Spring 2018 season: Further updates to the DBI package, to provide a consistent interface between R and ... [Read more...]

I had an amazing time this week participating in the 2018 ROpenSci Unconference, the sixth annual ROpenSci hackathon bringing together people to advance the tools and community for scientific computing with R. It was so inspiring to be among such a talented and dedicated group of people — special kudos goes to ... [Read more...]

I had a great time in Budapest last week for the eRum 2018 conference. The organizers have already made all of the videos available online. Here's my presentation: Speeding up R with Parallel Programming in the cloud. You can find (and download) my presentation slides here. And if you just want ... [Read more...]

This week at the BUILD conference, Microsoft announced that Power BI custom visuals will soon be available as charts with Excel. You'll be able to choose a range of data within an Excel workbook, and pass those data to one of the built-in Power BI custom visuals, or one you've ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. Microsoft R Open 3.4.4, based on R 3.4.4, is now available. An R script by Ryan Timpe converts a photo into instructions for rendering it as LEGO bricks. R functions to build a random maze ... [Read more...]

The topic for my talk at the Microsoft Build conference yesterday was "Migrating Existing Open Source Machine Learning to Azure". The idea behind the talk was to show how you can take the open-source tools and workflows you already use for machine learning and data science, and easily transition them ... [Read more...]

I've been heads-down this week preparing for some upcoming talks, so not as much blogging as usual this week. But there have been some interesting conversations on Twitter this week that you may be interested to check out if you're not on the platform. Steph Lock shares her go-to R ... [Read more...]

An update to Microsoft R Open (MRO) is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux. This release upgrades the R language engine to version 3.4.4, which addresses some minor issues with timezone detection and some edge cases in some statistics functions. As a maintenance release, it's backwards-compatible with scripts ... [Read more...]

The entrance to our office in Redmond in is adorned with this sculpture of our department logo, rendered in LEGO: We had fun with LEGO bricks at work this week. APEX is our internal team name, this was fun. Oh and we're hiring for all roles in Azure! pic.twitter.... [Read more...]

Last week at the New York R Conference, I gave a presentation on using R in Minecraft. (I've embedded the slides below.) The demo gods were not kind to me, and while I was able to show building a randomly-generated maze in the Minecraft world, my attempt to have the ... [Read more...]

A major update to R is now available. The R Core group has announced the release of R 3.5.0, and binary versions for Windows and Linux are now available from the primary CRAN mirror. (The Mac release is forthcoming.) Probably the biggest change in R 3.5.0 will be invisible to most users — ... [Read more...]

In an update to his analysis of taxi and ride-share trips, Todd Schnieder reports that the number of daily Uber rides exceeds the number of taxi rides in New York City, as of November 2017. The data is provided by the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, and the analysis and ... [Read more...]

The R Consortium has been quite busy lately, so I thought I'd take a moment to bring you up to speed on some recent news. (Disclosure: Microsoft is a member of the R Consortium, and I am a member of its board of directors.) Many R Consortium funded projects are ... [Read more...]

I had a great time this week at the Qcon.ai conference in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of presenting to an audience of mostly Java and Python developers. It's unfortunate that videos won't be available for a while, because there were some amazing presentations: those by Matt ... [Read more...]

Tal Galili's R-bloggers.com has been syndicating blog posts about R for quite a while — from memory I'd say about 8 years, but I couldn't find the exact date it started aggregating. Anyway, it contains a wealth of information about activity in the R ecosystem, but without any easy way to ... [Read more...]