Launch Meetup: The Role of R and Data Visualisation in Understanding Our World

Hi everyone,

Our very first meetup will be held on Tuesday, October 18th at 6:30 pm! Everyone with interest in the R language and supports diversity in the field is welcome!

We value your inputs, so please participate in profiling survey (https://goo.gl/forms/djEYUwhSQabSe3fv2) . This survey is completely anonymous and won't take a minute!

On the day of launch meeting, we will present you about global R-Ladies groups and show you some statistics which triggered us to create R-Ladies Melbourne. Afterward, we will be hosting an awesome speaker; details are below!

Lastly, we'll socialize while having pizzas sponsored by DSM (https://www.meetup.com/Data-Science-Melbourne/), drinks sponsored by Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.com/) and cakes sponsored by Bakes by Jean (http://bakesbyjean.com/cakes-1).

We'd like to know more about you! You are more than welcome to prepare 1 min slide to introduce yourself to the community. Please email me your slide by 14th of October if you are interested.

We are profoundly proud to announce that our first speaker will be Di Cook from Monash University. Here are the details of her talk.

Frugal Guide to Quantitative Citizenship: The Role of R and Data Visualisation in Understanding Our World.

In this technological age, we are drowning in data. Good data visualisation helps us to swim, digest the data, and learn about our world. The statistics community creates visualisation systems within the context of data analysis, so the graphics are designed to support and enrich the statistical processes of data exploration, modeling, and inference. With open data and open source software, the world is your oyster.

Di Cook is Professor of Business Analytics in the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Her research is in data visualisation, exploratory data analysis, multivariate methods, data mining and statistical computing. She is currently working on bridging the gap between statistical inference and exploratory graphics, using crowd-sourcing experiments with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and examining the reading of data plots using eye-tracking equipment. She is actively involved in developing open source software including xgobi, ggobi, and several R packages, nullabor, tourr, ggbio and ggenealogy. Professor Cook received a BSc majoring in Mathematics, Statistics and Biochemistry, from the University of New England, Armidale, and a MS and PhD in Statistics from Rutgers University, NJ, USA.

We are so much looking forward to meeting you all amazing R-Ladies of Melbourne!