Lessons and highlights from the rOpenSci project

Hi All!

We are very excited to have another speaker visiting Auckland this February. If you are interested in R, whether a beginner or an expert, then put this in your diary!

Doors open at 6pm
Talk will commence at 6:30pm

# Speaker
Karthik Ram is a Data Scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Berkeley Institute for Global Change Biology. He is a co-founder of rOpenSci, a collective to support the development of R-based tools which facilitate open science and access to open data.

# Full Title
Reproducible data science with R: Lessons and highlights from the rOpenSci project

# Summary
The Open Science movement, which promotes sharing all artifacts of scientific research such as data, code, and methods, is becoming increasingly popular among researchers worldwide. This rapid increase in popularity is evidenced in the thriving ecosystem of tools and also numerous training initiatives that have sprung up at various institutions.

One such effort in this space is the rOpenSci project (https://ropensci.org). Founded as a grassroots effort six years ago, the project works to promote open and reproducible research by enabling discovery of data, code and software, creating the technical and social infrastructure to enable reproducible research, and advocate for a culture of open science in various disciplines. This community driven project builds upon R’s popularity as a scientific research tool and fills in additional gaps in the computational pipeline by providing tools for data acquisition (from APIs and other source), data manipulation (including an emerging suite for spatial data analysis and mapping), data visualization tools, and data publication tools. Beyond tooling, the project has been working towards promoting best practices in scientific computing (beyond the R language itself) by developing a highly successful model for peer review of scientific software, mentorship, and community development.

In this talk I’ll speak about the history and motivations behind the project, demo some of our recent tools that can streamline your data science workflow, and also talk about our efforts to build community through various initiatives.

Thanks to our Sponsors:

• rOpenSci project for food and drink
• GridAKL for sponsoring the venue