In the New York Times' "Bits" blog today, Quentin Hardy offers recollections on Big Data talks at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. He begins with a definition of Big Data: Big Data is really about ... the benefits we will gain by cleverly sifting through it to find and exploit new patterns ... [Read more...]

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco today, Oracle announced the new Oracle Big Data Appliance, "a new engineered system that includes an open source distribution of Apache™ Hadoop™, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and an open source distribution of ... [Read more...]

I have an article out this week on ReadWriteHack: Unlocking Big Data with R. My thanks to the folks at ReadWriteWeb for giving us the opportunity to showcase some of the many real-world Big Data applications of R. Here are some additional links about the applications mentioned in the article: ... [Read more...]

An article in FastCompany today profiles two websites that excel in telling engaging stories with data: the FlowingData and OkTrends blogs. Both sites often use R for data analysis and data visualization, and have been featured here on this blog. FlowingData regularly posts guides on how to use R to ... [Read more...]

Earlier this month Thomas Dinsmore, solutions architect for IBM Netezza’s Advanced Analytics team, had a great blog post on why companies should embrace R as an analytics platform. He says: There are three main reasons R should be part of your enterprise analytics architecture: R has capabilities not available ... [Read more...]

I'm really pleased that an article I wrote, "5 real-world uses of big data", has been published in the widely-read technology blog GigaOm. In the article, I review five examples of using data science techniques and R to make sense of some large real-world data sets: Drew Conway's analysis of the ... [Read more...]

Yesterday's New York Times includes a great article on the failure of some genetic tests for cancer detection, and the flaws in the research that led to them. The article features quotes from Keith Baggerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, and includes a photo of him and colleague Kevin Coombes ... [Read more...]

CIO Magazine today has an article on the "6 Hottest New Jobs in IT" in which features Data Science and R at #2: "There's now an intellectual consensus in business that the only way to run an enterprise is to use analytics with data scientists to find opportunities," says Norman Nie, CEO ... [Read more...]

Leading analyst firm Gartner has just published its "Cool Vendors in Analytics and Business Intelligence" report for 2011 (download it here if you have a Gartner subscription). In the report, Revolution Analytics is named a Gartner Cool Vendor, and recognizes the company as "innovative, impactful and intriguing": Driven in part by ... [Read more...]

ComputerWorld's feature today, 22 free tools for data visualization and analysis, suggests open-source R as the third entry on the list: What it does: R is a general statistical analysis platform (the authors call it an "environment") that runs on the command line. Need to find means, medians, standard deviations, correlations? ... [Read more...]

Tech news site The Register has just published an in-depth profile of Revolution Analytics. It was great meeting the author Dan Olds at Revolution HQ a couple of weeks ago, and sharing with him why we think the R language is the way forward for data science: modern, applied, large-scale ... [Read more...]

Free dating site OkCupid (which was recently acquired by match.com) collects a lot of data. With over 3 million members, many of whom have provided extensive information about their personal details including preferences, lifestyle, sexuality and hobbies via their dating profiles, they have a wealth of information upon which to ... [Read more...]

Between the recent launch of Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 and the announcement of the SAS to R Challenge, there's been a flurry of recent news about Revolution Analytics and R in the media. Here's a quick recap: The Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan comments on the SAS to R Challenge: 'Red Hat ... [Read more...]

The December 20 issue of Forbes magazine, on newsstands now, includes a column about R on page 128 as part of the "Name You Need to Know in 2011" feature. It's basically an excerpt from this blog post by Steve McNally and its comments, and includes quotes from Norman Nie of Revolution Analytics, ... [Read more...]

Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, was interested in visualizing the "locality of friendship". Luckily, he has some great data to work with: Facebook's social network of the friendships between its 500 million members. But visualizing that much data can be a challenge in its own ... [Read more...]

Last month TDWI's James Powell interviewed Revolution CEO Norman Nie and published the interview as "R 101". The article answers some of the basic questions about R, such as: What is R? Why is R well-suited for predictive analytics? Why is R superior? How easy is it to learn R? Where ... [Read more...]

R and the NYC R User Group get brief mentions in this article about AOL's offices in New York City. The NYC UseRs meet at AOL and (ironically) the next meeting on Dec 9 is on the topic of R at Google. New York Observer: Bringing Some Sizzle to the Dial-Up ... [Read more...]

Steve McNally of the Forbes Mean Business blog says R is a name you need to know for 2011. He cites some great examples of R in action: Facebook has used R to figure out that “just two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook: (i) ... [Read more...]

The co-creator of R, University of Auckland Associate Professor of Statistics Dr. Ross Ihaka, was yesterday awarded the Catalyst Lifetime Achievement in Open Source Award at the 2010 New Zealand Open Source Awards. From the announcement: Dr. Ihaka is one of the originators of the world-renown ‘R’ programming language and software ... [Read more...]

In an article looking at once-niche programming languages that are now being deployed in businesses, R is named as one of 7 programming languages on the rise: R is another Swiss Army Knife of numerical and statistical routines for hacking through the big data sets -- collections big enough that it ... [Read more...]