R User Days in Galicia

R User Days in Galicia

R, https://www.r-project.org/, for those who don't know it, is a statistic program that won him the position of great alternative to the classic SPSS. The R statistical package is a statistical environment that includes data analysis and graphing tools. It is free software and runs under Windows, MAC OS and Linux. R is really a language and set of statistical modules that, by means of any of the interfaces that it has, allows to carry out data analysis and representation of the same ones.

The Hispanic R Community, http://r-es.org/ has among its objectives to promote the advancement of knowledge and use of R programming language and the development of the profession in all its aspects, especially the research, teaching and business (extracted from article five of its Articles of Association).

To this end, the Community organises conferences, courses, working sessions, local user groups, etc., and since 2009 has been organising national conferences, http://r-es.org/jornadas/. The purpose of these courses is to provide a meeting point for R users, foster collaboration between them in a multidisciplinary environment, disseminate knowledge of the language and its possibilities and promote the use of R. The conferences have been held annually and uninterruptedly since 2009 in different Spanish cities, Murcia in 2009, Mieres in 2010, Madrid 2011, Barcelona in 2012, Zaragoza in 2013, Santiago de Compostela in 2014, Salamanca in 2015, Albacete in 2016 and the last ones in 2017 in Granada.

On the Galician level, on 10 October 2013 the I Xornada de Usuarios R was organised in Galicia.

This day was born with the aim of uniting the entire community of users of R in a single forum in Santiago de Compostela, and with the intention of sharing the experiences and work carried out in our autonomous community and, in this way, having a global vision of the opportunities and fields of action of this tool and interacting personally with the professionals who use it.

The I Xornada de Usuarios R in Galicia was attended by important professionals from the health sector, academics, researchers and public administration in general and business that are reference in Galicia in the use of this software, and open to anyone interested in knowing R could attend and participate in it.

The first edition was organized by MeLiSA (Asociación de Usuarios e Software Libre de Terra de Melide, http://www.melisa.gal/ ) within the activities included in an agreement signed with AMTEGA (Agencia para la Modernización Tecnológica de Galicia), with the collaboration of CNTG (Centro de Novas Tecnoloxías de Galicia, https://emprego.xunta.es/cntxes-pro/), OSL (Oficina de Software Libre, http://osl.cixug.es/) CIXUG, and the Galician government.

With the same objective as the first edition, the second edition was organised in 2015 (1 October), the third in 2016 (19 October) and the fourth edition so far (20 October) in 2017. The programmes for these four editions are available on the website https://www.r-users.gal They were always one-day edition, usually with a conference block with speakers of the style of the first one and training block with one or two courses/workshops, depending on the year.

In addition, in 2014 the fourth national edition were organized in Santiago. All its information can be consulted on the website http://r-es.org/tiki/VI+Jornadas. Part of the organising committee of this day is a regular part of the galician organisation.

The II Xornada de Usuarios de R in Galicia was held on 1 October 2015. It was organized by the Free Software Users Association of Terra de Melide (MeLiSA), and sponsored by AMTEGA (Xunta de Galicia).

The first two days and the fourth national conference were held at the Centro de Novas Tecnoloxías de Galicia (CNTG) in Santiago de Compostela.

The III and IV Xornada de Usuarios de R in Galicia took place in the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Santiago de Compostela.

These last two editions were organized by the OSL - Office of Free Software of CIXUG and sponsored by AMTEGA.

The workshops that have been given in all these sessions were as follows:

  • Creation of packages, reports and bullet points with R in 2013

  • Raster Data Display in 2014 (IV national edition)

  • Predictive models with the caret package in 2014 (IV national edition)

  • Display of Time Series in 2014 (IV National Edition)

  • Receipt of coloR and visualization in R in the year 2014 (IV national edition)

  • From data to scientific publication: R, Markdown & Sweave in 2015

  • Introduction to R in 2016

  • Reproducibility in science with R in 2016

  • Introduction to R in 2017

  • Web Scraping in 2017

These days are broadcast live and then posted on the Youtube R Users Gal channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG1_1eqe_KvoVByZeFFFErQ, to be available to the entire community.

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