March OxfordRUG meeting

Agenda:

6:00 pm: Rich FitzJohn (https://richfitz.github.io/) -- Using R's crazy introspection to build humane user interfaces

7:00 pm: Pizza and wine!

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R is a bizarre language - it superficially looks like a statistics program, but hides some unexpected features that hint at its experimental origin. In particular, R lets you pass around program code, modify and rewrite it before perhaps running it (or doing something entirely different with it). In this talk, I will present three case-studies where this flexibility helped me develop user-friendly interfaces; (1) `cyphr` - a simple approach to encryption, (2) `odin` - an R-to-C compiler for solving differential equations and (3) `stevedore` - an automatically generated interface to docker, from R.

Rich FitzJohn is a research software engineer at Imperial College London. Coming from a background in computational biology, he now works in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology where he helps scale up research code and do research reproducibly.

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Oxford RUG is thrilled to be sponsored by Mango Solutions. Thanks to their generosity, there will be pizza from Franco Manca and wine after the meeting.