December useR Meetup

We have 3 confirmed lightning presentations for December's meetup!
Additional details to be provided.

Talk 1:
Title: Advancing pre-clinical research with R and cloud computing
Presented by Nobal Dhruw, Sabu George, Shashank Jatav

Abstract:
R has been the popular tool of choice for performing bioinformatics analysis by researchers in the drug discovery space given the availability of many open-source packages and libraries in the public domain. These open-source tools enable researchers to analyze and generate insights from their biomedical data. Typically, the analysis and the consumption of insights is done via an interactive web interface powered by shiny, an R package to build web-apps. However, our experience developing traditional shiny apps for biological (omics) data analysis, has exposed to us problems related to the handling of voluminous datasets, and the associated computationally expensive jobs, typical characteristics of biological data. Then, there is also the problem of workflow customisability, as a shiny app is often built to cater to one specific use case. But it is often desired to have a certain degree of flexibility and customisability in-built into the system, which would allow the end-users themselves to create their own workflow by stitching together the atomic components. Here, we describe how we have leveraged cloud computing services to mitigate these issues and create an infrastructure which would enable the bioinformaticians to perform data analysis in an easy and intuitive manner, and at the same time giving them the liberty to package their R code as a custom component, without having to worry about how to make their code production-ready. Our infrastructure platform manages the allocation of machine resources required to execute the component.

Bio:
Nobal Dhruw (Sr. Data Scientist, Elucidata)
Sabu George (Tech Lead, Elucidata)
Shashank Jatav (Sr. Data Scientist, Elucidata)

Talk #2:
R and SQLite: A Winning Combination
Presented by Bryan Cafferky

R is an awesome data analysis language. SQLite is the most popular relational database on the planet. Why not use them together? In this presentation, Bryan will explain how persisting data to a SQLite database with R can greatly enhance your data analysis and machine learning development. Best of all, it's easy to use. Join us for this fun and practical presentation.

Bio:
Bryan is the author of the book Master Azure Databricks Step by Step available on Amazon and the creator of a popular data engineering and artificial intelligence YouTube training channel. He had decades of experience in multiple industries and was a Microsoft Worldwide Learning Data Science content creator. He authored Pro PowerShell for Database Developers published by Apress. Bryan is currently a Data and AI consultant and frequently speaks on technical subjects. His a past Microsoft Data Platform and Cloud MVP. He leads the Rhode Island Business Intelligence Virtual User Group https://www.meetup.com/The-RI-Microsoft-BIUG/. Bryan's YouTube channel can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/BryanCafferky

Talk #3
What's new in dbplyr 2.0.0?!
Presented by Mara Averick

Bio:
Mara is the tidyverse developer advocate at RStudio