"Official" BARUG August 2013 Meeting

Agenda
6:30 PM - Pizza and networking
7:00 - announcements
7:10 - Norm Matloff on Rdsm
7:45 - John Mount - Science as and interdisciplinary exercise

Norm will present his "much Improved" version of Rdsm, an R package that provides a threads-type programming environment for R, usable both on a multicore machine and across a network of multiple machines. Tests done so far indicate that Rdsm
is sometimes substantially faster than the 'parallel' library in core R. Also, due to the optional use of backing store, it can handle very large matrices

John writes: I will talk about data science as an interdisciplinary exercise. Data science is often confused with big data engineering, statistics and machine learning. It is in fact a collaborative exercise requiring listening, education and consensus building. I will share my experiences (good and bad) and tricks (good and bad) using R as a platform for data science with an emphasis on topics related to my upcoming book: "Practical Data Science with R." (http://www.manning.com/zumel/)

Dr. Norm Matloff is a professor of computer science (formerly professor of statistics) at the University of California at Davis, author of the Art of R Programming (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781593273842.do) and organizer of the BARUG.

John Mount, has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon (for work on randomized algorithms and optimization). He has worked as a computational scientist in biotechnology, a stock trading algorithm designer and managed a research team for a major online shopping site. John Mount is now a principal consultant at Win-Vector LLC and writes for the Win-Vecto blog (http://www.win-vector.com/blog/author/john-mount/).