Applications of R

Thanks again to Shane for suggesting this meetup topic!

UPDATE: Before the applications talks begin, we will be hearing from Geoff Lewis of TopGuest.com (https://www.topguest.com/gate) about his start-up, their data, and opportunities to join their team.

This meetup with cover several examples of how R can be used across a wide range of research fields. Each presenter will discuss their topic for 10-15 minutes, and then the audience will have an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback.

Pankaj Chopra - using R and Bioconductor ( https://www.bioconductor.org/docs/install/ ) for biomarker detection in cancer
Andrew Ilardi - an R project that analyzes a list of stocks while reaching out to the web to pull their historical prices, then plots Quarter over Quarter correlations and a year over year scatter plot.
Jared Lander - analyzing data from 30 countries in the World Health Survey that were the result of a comprehensive look at the lives of thousands of people in each country, we fit multilevel models using lmer() to model and display the differing affect wealth has on the probability of contracting Noncommunicable Diseases at differing levels of development. Jared will also be sharing his research on finding the best pizza in NYC (https://www.jaredlander.com/wordpress/wordpress-2.9.2/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Pizza-Thesis.pdf), and how he used R in this research.
Andrew Little - often in game theory (and presumably other applied math settings) we are interested in the behavior of equations with no explicit solution. I will demonstrate how I use the optim() and other functions in R for such situations in my research
John Myles White - use of R for analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain, and review the basic ideas behind fMRI analysis and show how it can be easily implemented in R using only default functions.

As you can see, quite an eclectic assortment of topics that I am sure everyone will find interesting. Thanks to all of the speakers for volunteering. We will have the usual networking time starting at 6:15pm and speakers will begin promptly at 7:00pm.

See you in April!