Please say hello

[ijlyttle]

I think this will be a great way to make sure we feel good about our GitHub accounts.

Please respond to this issue by introducing yourself, or if you like you can respond with an emoji.

[AmeliaMN]

Hello! I'm Amelia McNamara, I live in Minneapolis and teach at the University of St Thomas.

Not sure if Ian is going to cover this later, but I think it's fun to have a picture (either of yourself, or something else you like) as your Github profile picture, rather than the default picture Github picks for you. If you want to do that, go up to the top right corner of this screen and click the drop-down arrow next to your current picture and select "Your Profile." Once you're there, just click on the square of your current picture and upload a new one!

I'm excited for the unconf!

[ijlyttle]

Thanks Amelia!

I'm so glad to be working with @AmeliaMN, @haleyjeppson, and @sctyner on this day-zero, not least because I am forgetting to go over a lot of stuff, but together, we'll be covered!

Also, you can use GitHub handles (mine is @ijlyttle) to tag people into a conversation.

Where are my manners? I'm Ian Lyttle, I work as a data-scientist at Schneider Electric in Cedar Rapids, IA. I've used R for about eight years, and while I am a fan of the tidyverse, I am a bigger fan of the community!

I, too, am excited for the unconf!

[mkosmicki]

I've got my RStudio updated and popped in here to say "Hello World". (The first thing you ever do when programming....right? LOL) I'm really excited to meet all of you in a few weeks at the unconf. I'm hoping to learn a lot from those who have been using R for a lot longer than I have.

I have a BA in Clinical Psych and a MA in Ed Psych (Quantitative & Qualitative Methods) from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln (Go Huskers!). I spent 16 years in state government (14 working for Nebraska's PBS & NPR station) before moving to Iowa.

I currently work for an advertising agency in West Des Moines as a Sr. Marketing Analyst. I managed to go a very long time using SPSS (like 25 years!) for most of my analysis needs. Now the time has come to get busy with R.

Also....I was wondering if anyone had played with RStudio Cloud? I was installing RStudio on my home laptop last night and saw RStudio Cloud Alpha.

[DrFletch]

I am looking forward to meeting you all in a few weeks at the unconference and learning from R super-users. I also utilize SPSS, Excel, Access, and SQL server management studio. I frequently find myself using a combination of tools to complete a task depending on the project.

I earned a B.A. in Political Science from Winona State University; from Iowa State University an M.P.A. (Public Administration) and Ph.D. (Education Leadership). GO CYCLONES!

I currently work in the Division of Community Colleges and Workforce Preparation at the Iowa Department of Education. Five years prior, I worked at Iowa State University as an undergraduate programs coordinator.

[ijlyttle]

Hi @mkosmicki and @DrFletch,

Welcome, and thanks for saying hello!

I have used RStudio Cloud as an end-user, it worked great! I understand that it can be useful in the classroom to let folks use R without having to install it. Among the organizers, one of the ideas we have in the back of our heads is to have some instances of RStudio Cloud ready just-in-case someone's installation "goes sideways" on them.

I see you are both SPSS users, so I'll look forward to learning how you "see" R, given your SPSS perspectives (I have never used SPSS, myself).

[ajmcoqui]

Hello! I'm very excited to be participating; I've never been to an unconf before, and am frankly slightly terrified that I'll make a muck of it since I've only been working with R for three years.

My name is Amanda Gadrow, I live in Columbus, OH, and I work at RStudio as a software engineer. My profile photo is an alpaca because I think it's a funny picture, but a photo of the real me is below.

My background is in software development and testing, so I know a lot about best practices in software design, development, testing, maintainability, and performance. However, I am not a statistician, so all of my work in R has been learned on the job, and in service of creating apps that use our internal data to determine where we can make improvements to our products, documentation, and business. At RStudio, I've got one foot in Support and one in QA, so I'm good with troubleshooting, configuration, and issue reprex. I really like collaborating with other teams to solve bigger problems, and that love of collaboration is one of the big reasons I'm excited about this unconf.

Little known fact: before I got into software, I was a professional musician. I'm a classically trained mezzo-soprano, and both my undergrad and graduate degrees are in music. I started a PhD in 18th-century Spanish opera (zarzuela), and though I never finished my dissertation, I still hope to get back to those scores some day.

[ijlyttle]

Hi @ajmcoqui!

I'm super-glad that Amanda is coming to the Unconf. I've had the pleasure of working with her, and I'm excited that you all will, as well.

My company has been an RStudio customer, and from time-to-time, I would find ways to run into trouble with Shiny Server Pro or RStudio Connect. I would try my best to get together a reproducible example, then send an email to customer support. It would be with a great sense of relief when an email would come back from Amanda, because I knew she was going to get to the root of the problem. 🙌

I had no idea of Amanda's musical experience, how cool! Are there any other folks here with a musical background?

[davidbody]

Hi everyone. This is my first unconference of this kind and I'm eager to participate. Like others I'm not quite sure what to expect.

My name is David Body and I'm an independent software developer who wants to get more involved in data science. I'm located in Polk City, Iowa, just a few miles north of the unconference venue.

My software development work has been varied and has included Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, Clojure, Racket and various SQL and non-SQL databases. I'm a strong believer and advocate for automated testing.

My customers are mostly businesses, non-profits, and state governments, and I've also worked with a couple of start-ups. Part of a current project involves controlling a 360-degree camera via Python, so there's always something new to figure out.

I'm comfortable with Git and use it daily. I was surprised to see that my GitHub account is almost 11 years old. It sure doesn't seem that long.

I've been using R for almost 4 years, mostly for personal projects. I wrote an R package for an on-line course I took, but package development isn't something I normally do.

My academic background is in economics and law. I completed the coursework for a PhD in economics but didn't write a dissertation. I practiced tax and business law in Des Moines for 8 years before starting my software development firm.

[wendtke]

Hello, all. I am delighted to meet everyone in a few weeks. I will be traveling from Fort Collins, CO, where I am a graduate student (MS/PhD) at Colorado State University in Human Development and Family Studies. Here, I am surrounded by intelligent social scientists who elect to use SPSS for some unfathomable reason. I consider open science practices (including reproducible code and digestible visualizations) to be the life rafts of the quietly degenerating social sciences. On that light-hearted note, see you in April!

[ijlyttle]

Hi @davidbody and @wendtke,

Welcome! It may be that you are the folks who are traveling the shortest and longest distances to attend 😀

David: This will be my first unconf, too, so I don't know what to expect at some level. I suspect, though, that you have made a career out of succeeding when not knowing quite what to expect!

This seems like a good opportunity to remind you (and everyone) that you are invited to participate on the Unconf issues page to discuss projects that may interest you.

Kathleen: You'll find a very receptive crowd here on reproducible code and digestible visualizations! Sorry to hear about the quiet degeneration, but I like your phrasing about "life rafts"!

[DrFletch]

@ijlyttle @AmeliaMN @ajmcoqui @wendtke @mkosmicki this is also my first "Unconference," and I live in Ankeny so I might have the shortest commute! Also, I attempted to upload a photo for my avatar but it is not updating... not sure why?

[nikdata]

Hi everyone! I'm super stoked to join my first unconf. I think this will be an excellent opportunity for me to meet new folks from all over the region. Like @DrFletch, I live in Ankeny, IA and I'm looking forward to a short commute as well!

I have a BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Northern Illinois University and an MS in Data Science from Northwestern University. See you all soon!

[AmandaRaeISU]

Hello everybody! I am Amanda Rae I hail from Des Moines, Iowa. I graduated from Iowa State University with my BS in Statistics in May 2018. In the past year I have been searching for a job that I will get to use the skills I learned while I was in school. The summer between my junior and senior year I had a internship with CSAFE and this is where I was introduced to R. It was a great preparation for my senior year as my classes had a heavy focus on R. After graduation I wanted to keep current on my R programming so co-organized a chapter of R-Ladies in Des Moines. I am stoked for this opportunity and I am excited to work with everyone and understand what an Unconf is about.

[ijlyttle]

Hi @nikdata and @AmandaRaeISU,

Thanks for saying hello, looking forward to meeting you both in person!

It's great to see the different ways we all arrive as R users; some with a background in engineering; others from statistics, and I know there will be plenty of other routes represented at our Unconf!

Just a quick shoutout to the R-Ladies organization; I know we will have plenty of participants and organizers here. It's such a super idea, implemented so effectively all over the world! I know you do not need an invitation from me, but I would invite other R-Ladies to tell us about your participation, too.

[yihui]

Hi everyone! This is Yihui. I'm visually better known with my south park avatar online. There was actually one person who successfully recognized me in real life from this avatar a few years ago. My older son also pointed at my Github page on my screen and said that guy was daddy when he was 2, so I guess I didn't do a bad job when I created this avatar more than a decade ago.

I used to be a "GIF expert extraordinaire" but I think I've been obviously losing to many other people in the community, so I started to collect static images instead... Currently my personal favorite is (since I'm also an introvert):

Of course, this time I cannot unite in my own home. I'll drive from Omaha to Des Moines to meet you all. If you need ideas to work on, I have tons of (some have been listed here). I always have way more (interesting and boring) things to do on my mind than I can practically do, and I want to take this unconf opportunity to pour them out. I hope I can find some long-term collaborators there.

I maintain more than 20 packages on CRAN, and sometimes my life as a developer is like

not because the work is not interesting, but I cannot handle too much interesting work by myself (figuring out what to do is easy, but figuring out what not to do is super hard). I'll be happy to share my experience and tips about developing R packages, writing books, blogging, or whatever you want to know.

Lastly, I just cannot help posting yet another picture in my gallery, with apologies to @mkosmicki above:

Well, I do have a GIF to make it up, though...

[ijlyttle]

It's not easy to follow a @yihui post 🤣, so just to note that we are indeed fortunate that Yihui will be attending!

We are looking forward to a tutorial he will present on day-zero (scheduled tentatively in the afternoon) on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS!

[gergness]

This will also be my first unconference and I'm also very excited!

I first started using R at my first job when I needed to use the geographic features (though I mostly used Stata back then). Later on at the Iowa Department of Public Health, I was supposed to learn SAS - I did learn enough to show my boss that R's survey package got identical results, and then I was free to use it (especially after showing off the ability to dynamically generate and update RMarkdown reports like this one - many thanks to @yihui & collaborators).

Now I work at the University of Minnesota on IPUMS, where we provide harmonized census and survey data for researchers to use. Like @wendtke, I'm surrounded by well-meaning SPSS (and Stata & SAS) users, and I'm again in an informal R evangelist role, showing how internal workflows could be improved with R and also developing the ipumsr package that provides the same kind of support for R users that we were already providing for Stata, SPSS and SAS users.

I sadly can't make it to day zero because I'll be running a special catch-up boot camp for this little one, but wish you all the best & I'll do my best to follow along!

See ya'll soon!

[dshadravan]

Hi everyone! Sounds like I'm not the only one who calls Ankeny, Iowa home. :) I do travel quite a lot around the country for my job though; I'm a customer-facing data scientist on the Einstein product team at Salesforce.com. - I spend most of my time with the largest 200 companies in the U.S.A. helping them think about how to apply data science and machine learning.

At Salesforce have a number of technologies that our customers use primarily for doing descriptive/predictive analytics, ML, and AI on their customer data. Prior to Salesforce, I was a pre-sales solution engineer at Microsoft for many years doing work with enterprise customers on SharePoint, Exchange, SQL, etc. I also wrote a couple of tech books for Microsoft Press while I was there.

I'm a relative newb with R compared to some of you; much of my exposure to R projects has been in my Data Science Master's at U. of Wisconsin. I'm looking forward to learning from the many experts/gurus who are attending - and of course sharing some of my experiences and skills. This will be my first R conference, and I am planning to attend day zero.

Aside from work, I'm kept busy with hobbies (racing bicycles, playing guitar in a band), my two dogs (Aussies), and my four kids! Look forward to meeting you all!

Darvish

[mkosmicki]

@yihui you are cracking me up with the images & gif! I recently had to move all my data from our SQL server to Azure data lake....our IT-IS guys were getting worried about the size of one particular file that nearly brought the whole system down. :-) They were so impressed, they made me a meme!

I've found that working with data using R can sometimes be like this for me.....

And other days like this.....

I'm hoping that working with all of you at unconf will help me have more of those 'hoist it high' days because I accomplished something big and cool. :-)

Michelle

[ijlyttle]

Welcome @gergness and @dshadravan!

Like @gergness, I think there may be more than a few of us who are the "R" person at work, so I'm looking forward to us getting together to compare notes!

I'm also looking forward to hearing how @dshadravan thinks about data-science communication with the end-customer (or potential end-customer) in mind, as I am usually thinking about other data-science folks.

As well, I see in @mkosmicki's bio that she works with Tableau. At my company we have a large Tableau community, but not based in Iowa. I understand that Tableau has an implementation of grammar-of-graphics, like ggplot2. I'll be interested to hear from folks who have experience with both ggplot2 and Tableau about how they "think" about the relationship between the two.

Apparently, I will not be doing any coding at the Unconf, I'll just be talking with people 😬😇

[sctyner]

Hi all!

I finally had a moment to sit down and read through all of these introductions, and I'm thrilled to have you all here! I also live in Ankeny, so I'm excited to meet some of my neighbors! I'll go ahead and introduce myself, too!

I'm Sam, and I'm a postdoc in the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE). I earned my PhD in statistics in 2017 from Iowa State. Prior to coming to ISU I graduated from Augustana College (IL), where I majored in Math, Economics, and French. Bonjour! I also tweet a lot about #rstats: @sctyner

I have attended three previous unconfs, which inspired me to organize this event, and I can't wait to meet you all!

My go-to fun fact is that I'm the oldest of seven. Here we are in person and in Bitmoji:

[charlesminshew]

Hi everyone, my name is Charles Minshew, and I'm the Director of Data Services for Investigative Reporters and Editors. We're a non-profit organization that supports watchdog, data and investigative journalism. I'm based at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.

This will be my first unconference, but my second R event I am attending this year. My very first R conference, was Rstudio::conf 2019 in Austin. I develop curriculum and teach R classes to journalists looking to use R in their newsrooms around the globe. I previously worked at the Orlando Sentinel as a data reporter.

I look forward to meeting everyone!

[speegled]

Hi, everyone! I'm Darrin Speegle and I am a professor at Saint Louis University in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. This will be my first unconference, and my second R conference overall (useR! 2017 in Brussels). I am also on the organizational committee for useR! 2020, which if you haven't heard yet, is going to be in St Louis!

I am looking forward to meeting all of you and getting to know more R folks throughout the uncoast.

[ijlyttle]

Hi @sctyner, @charlesminshew, and @speegled!

It's been a pleasure to work with Sam on the Unconf - hard to believe only 3 weeks to go! Also... seven!

Looking forward to meeting Charles and Darrin in a few weeks! I think there will be a few of us at the Unconf who were also at rstudio::conf() in Austin (the RStudio folks, certainly). It continues to be a highlight of my year; Charles, sorry I missed meeting you there. Excited to hear that my other favorite conference, useR!, is coming back to this continent, looking forward to hearing more about it from Darrin (whom I missed meeting at Brussels)!

[kwstat]

Hello everyone. My name is Kevin Wright.

I live outside of Des Moines and will compete for shortest commute. I work in Research at Corteva (aka Pioneer), which is literally across the street (and field) from the conference site at John Deere. I've been using R for 20 years (okay, the first few years were S-Plus). I have 10 packages on CRAN--mostly niche topics, but "corrgram" gets a fair bit of use. This is my first Unconf--looking forward to meeting people in the flesh.

I use both RStudio and Emacs for working with R. More time in Emacs because I learned it first.

Here's an idea for dinner--Jethro's BBQ. It's a few blocks up the street and has a private dining room which might be big enough for our group.

[cvanpay]

Hi Unconfers, my name is Craig Van Pay and I'm a 3rd year PhD student at Iowa State University in the School of Education and Department of Human Development and Family Studies. I've only been using R for about 6 months at this point, and adopted its use for how great it is with linear mixed models.

As I'm interested in early language and literacy and preschool education, I utilize a lot of nested data, and data with which I fit growth models across time. I have become increasingly interested in methodological approaches for longitudinal data, and creating better measures of children's success use latent variable models over time.

Outside of use for statistics, I also use R for data and audio manipulation and processing. This includes processing of all day recordings of children, caregivers, and preschool teachers' speech and conversations. This use is where I would like to create a package in the future, because it can be cumbersome to handle these (some of them are proprietary file types).

Outside of the academic realm, I do a lot of service work with regard to early language and literacy. I am part of Ames Reads!, a community-based group to help children be ready for school in my community, and am part of the Rotary D6000 Literacy workgroup, where we try to bring evidence-based literacy practices to Rotary services groups in Iowa and Minnesota. Additionally, I coordinate a library-based parent education program for early language and literacy. As you can tell, I'm big on reading, and that's one of my favorite hobbies. For non-fiction I love reading methods and stats books and popular science, for fiction, I am a big fan of science fiction and fantasy. I also love playing board games with my wife, listening to a wide variety of music, and disc golfing!

I look forward to meeting everyone!

[anneae]

Hi everyone! I'm excited to meet all of you! I'm Anne Eaton, a 4th year PhD student in biostatistics at the University of Minnesota. I live in St Paul. I first "met" R in 2006, which is crazy. I have also used SAS a lot in the past. My PhD research focuses on time-to-event outcomes or survival analysis, which basically boils down to, how can we answer questions about processes that are happening over time, with data measured at fixed times or time intervals? This applies in medicine when we're interested in how long people live with a certain disease, but it also applies to things like how long a lightbulb lasts, whether and when people go back to prison, and how long songs stay on the Billboard top 40 list. I am starting to get interested in version control, readable code and making R packages as I think about making the statistical methods I'm developing available to others. So I hope to learn and think about those issues at the unconf. I'm a big fan of RStudio, but I don't use the tidyverse at all, which may be a conversation starter in this group :). I'm really interested in hearing more about the work you do at CSAFE, @sctyner! See you all in a few weeks.

[ijlyttle]

Great to meet you @kwstat, @cvanpay, @anneae!

I think Kevin might be one of the few folks at the Unconf for whom the phrase "for compatibility with S" has actual technical significance 😁

Over on the other greeting thread, I wrote how I am looking forward to hearing about all the wonderfully-ambitious ideas; Craig's idea certainly qualifies!

Anne - looking forward to hearing more about how you use time-based data! Are you familiar with the tsibble package? The bumper-sticker version: time-series tools that fit into the tidyverse (to start the conversation...). The author, Earo Wang, gave a super talk at rstudio::conf a few months back.

[anneae]

@ijlyttle: I am not familiar with that package - I'll check out the talk!

[minnesotka]

Hello everyone! I'm Larissa Stanberry and this will be my first unconference, or any R-specific event, ever. I've been using R for quite some time now; Matlab is one of my go-to tools as well. My background is in statistics and most of my research is in biomedical domain including time series, signal data, imaging, and shape analysis. I look forward to meeting you all and learning about new R-features and interesting projects.

This is my first ever visit to Iowa as well. I'm a recent transplant to the Twin Cities from Seattle. Needless to say, I'm excited about taking this road trip and seeing a new scenery.

See you soon!

[sctyner]

Just migrating @mdseege's introduction here (#14)

"Hello My name is Matthew Seegebarth, and I have worked for Nebraska Public Power District for over twenty years. I was introduced to R a couple years ago, and I am impressed with its capability. I am not sure what to expect at this conference, but i am excited to meet you all."

Thanks Matt!

[ijlyttle]

Hi @minnesotka and @mdseege!

FWIW, Matlab was my previous language to R, so I'll look forward to comparing notes with Larissa (also, welcome to Iowa in a couple of weeks!).

I'm guessing that Matthew may have been introduced to R by @srvanderplas, in which case I imagine you're working on a strong foundation!

[kmaurer]

Hello everyone, I am Karsten Maurer. I work at Miami University in Ohio's Miami River Valley (not the Florida Coastline) where I teach primarily data visualization and statistical learning. My research interests are in statistics education, visualization, and machine learning. The majority of my programming experience is in R.

I grew up in Minnesota and did my graduate work at Iowa State. I am looking forward to the chance to travel back to Iowa for the first time since I graduated in 2015. I am excited to meet all the unfamiliar names in this thread -- and reconnect with the familiar names -- while coding at the Uncoast Unconference.

[srvanderplas]

Hi, I'm Susan VanderPlas. I'm a research assistant professor at Iowa State University, working on image analysis, statistical methods for forensic data, and data visualization. In a past life, I worked as a data scientist for Nebraska Public Power District (with @mdseege), so I've seen the industry side of the world as well.

I did my graduate work at Iowa State on graphics and data visualization. My first introduction to package development was working on the animint package with Toby Hocking and (later) @cpsievert. Since then, I've developed several internal packages for NPPD and am currently working on x3ptools and bulletxtrctr for analysis of bullet data, kerasvis, which adds R support for the keras-vis library in python, and a number of other half-finished packages. I also do a fair amount of work with computer vision related to shoe forensics.

I'm excited!

[benjamincrary]

Hi Everyone, I'm Ben Crary and you can typically find me in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area. I work at an environmental engineering/water resources engineering firm called LimnoTech. My use of R is usually work/project-dependent, meaning I can go a month without opening R studio at work. I most commonly us R to answer water quality related questions and to visualize the data sets (e.g. what is the volume of suitable fish habitat in a lake and how does this volume change temporally?).

Recently I've been exploring ways to build my skillset outside of my work. I'm hoping to create side-projects and get involved with others to grow in the area of package development and spatial analysis.

Looking forward to meeting and contributing in a couple weeks!

[almccombs]

Hello world! I'm Audrey McCombs, and I'm a co-major PhD student at Iowa State University in Ecology and Statistics. I'm primarily interested in applying network analysis, and complexity science generally, to ecological systems. In various past lives I worked in Philosophy, and Natural Resources Management. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980's and went through the mandatory "coding is awesome!" phase, which I somehow grew out of and am currently in the process of growing back into. (Agent-based modeling in NetLogo... You mean that Logo? rotflmao. Hang on a sec while I dig out and dust off my Commodore 64.)

I use R primarily for statistical analysis at work. I've never built a package in R and am looking forward to learning from the experts. Also looking forward to meeting others outside of academia to remind me what it's like to work in the real world. Cheers!

[shelmich]

Hi! I'm Sam Helmich, and I've been in Data Science at Deere in a few different capacities since 2011. I have my masters from Iowa State in Statistics, and really enjoy using R!

[hlendway]

Hi Everyone! I’m very much looking forward to taking part in the Unconf. I’ll be driving down to Des Moines from lovely Minnesota. Fun fact I have lived in the same zip code my entire life, child hood home, college dorm (Macalester), college duplex, first house and hopefully now final house. Sounds like I don’t get out much, I love Having my roots in St. Paul but I also love to travel the world, hence my pic of me petting Kangaroos in Australia. It’s hard to pick a favorite travel destination so I’ll say Israel, Dubai, Scotland, Italy and Japan.

About my background, I spent ten years of my life doing web app development (mostly java) and then moved into a Data Scientist role at an insurance company. Last summer I moved to 3M where my focus has been automating reporting and building Shiny apps to make data more accessible to our division. We have recently implemented RStudio Connect on AWS so I have to ability to easily publish and share my work (which is amazing). My division manufactures window films, car wraps, cleaning chemicals, floor pads, hand pads and head sets. We have projects in the hopper to work with machine data from the manufacturing lines which I very much look forward to as it’s very different data and should be more complete, consistent and clean, we’ll see. I’ve also been asked to consult on many other projects for the division so the to do list is only a few miles long. I’m looking forward to changing gears for a few days and focus on projects at the Unconf.

See everyone soon!

[lebebr01]

Hi All! I'm Brandon LeBeau, an Assistant Professor of Educational Measurement and Statistics at the University of Iowa. My position is split half as traditional faculty and the other half is now affiliated with the Belin-Blank Center where I serve as a methodologist to enhance their research agenda. Prior to my affiliation with the Belin-Blank Center, I was affiliated with Iowa Testing Programs.

I've been in Iowa for about 5 years, but was born and lived in Minnesota for most of the first 30 years of my life. Made a short pit stop to Fayetteville Arkansas prior to coming to Iowa. I enjoy model building with applications to longitudinal analysis, psychometrics of both educational and psychological data, and building a few tools in R. I've used R since about 2005, starting with an undergraduate stats course at Luther College. Since then I've self-taught myself R and have created a handful of R packages in that time.

I'm looking forward to meeting everyone in a week!

[lex-files]

Hello all, I'm Alexis Saltzman, currently a CS student at University of Nebraska - Lincoln. I am a non-traditional student & also have 3 children, so I'm hoping to graduate in summer or fall 2020 but have learned not to get my hopes up too high :) For the last year I have been working as a research assistant on a NSF-funded psychology research project using R to determine the "best" machine learning algorithm to predict similarity judgments, i.e. is this number similar or dissimilar to this other number. The project has been really sink or swim (maybe it wouldn't have been if I was better at asking for help) so I've learned an incredible amount and hope to be able to continue working on these kinds of project. This will be my first unconference/conference, and I'm really excited to dive in!

[mharmston]

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Matt Harmston, and I am a Senior Research Scientist at ACT, Inc. I'll be coming into town from Iowa City, IA, so the drive won't be too bad. With my being an R user for less than a year and new to the Unconference experience, I'm quite uncertain what to expect. Regardless, my goals are very simple: Add to the diversity and quality of tools in my personal R tool-chest, and contribute to the team environment to the best of my ability.

My background includes graduate work in Student Affairs, followed by additional graduate work and 18 years as a researcher in Educational Measurement and Statistics. I am finding the transition to R after being a SAS user for 20 years to be quite fascinating.

I look forward to meeting everyone! Matt

[mkosmicki]

I was introduced to Shiny last night. OMG. Now I want to Shiny everything.

Here I am riding an R bike with training wheels...and I want to go hop on the carbon frame, ultra light racing bike without a helmet. LOL

I hope I don't slow everything down being amazed all week with the awesome R things I haven't seen yet.

[gzt]

Hey everybody - I'm Geoff Thompson, a statistics PhD student at Iowa State University. My work is mostly on clustering. This will be my first R unconference and I'm very much looking forward to meeting the people I haven't already met and working on some fun projects.

[Ranae]

Late to the party here, but I guess that's my story. I'm really bummed about it, but I won't be able to get to the unconf until Tuesday. As a silver lining, you will all get to meet @vanichols on Monday instead!

I am a postdoc in the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University. I have been using R for a while, but have never needed to do much beyond data wrangling, plotting, and analysis/modeling.

R was not very popular in our discipline/department 10 years ago and I have spent quite a bit of my time helping beginners get started so we can have better research practices around here. This has involved teaching some classes and starting an R-user group (Rgronomists, now run by @vanichols).

I live near Jewell, Iowa and go to Des Moines way more than I wish I had to. I like playing table tennis and I'm hoping John Deere financial is one of those corporate places that has some tables out -- but I doubt it! Not a bad idea for all of you to practice up just in case.

[vfquirin]

Hi, my name is Valquiria Quirino and I live in Moorhead, MN. I have a B.S. in Forest Engineering and a MS and a PhD in Forestry (Geospatial Sciences). I currently work as a data analyst, but I taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead and at Southern Oregon University. I am looking forward to meet you!

[iqis]

Hi everyone, my name is Siqi Zhang. I am sure to be the only one from the remote easternmost outpost of Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, which is closer to NYC than to Philadelphia.

I am a freelancer in media & advertising analytics (also probably the only one here) and have been using R for 7 years. But like many people here, I used SPSS before making the switch. My favorite modern language is Clojure, but I never had any chance to do anything meaningful with it.

As found myself spending more time building tools than doing anything else, I have since assumed myself the "R developer" title. I also love Shiny, and have done many interesting things with it.

I cannot always control the urge to give the "Whether you like it or not, your analysis is turning into software, that means version control, dependency management, proper documentation, reusable parts, automated testing, user-friendliness, and an engineering state-of-mind." speech to people, but I have been able to stop as soon as I sense annoyance in the air.

Something else about me：

• I use require() and <- but respect other's library() and =
• I use both Emacs/ESS and RStudio, but more and more RStudio to save my left pinky.
• I quit Python because I hate list comprehension

I'm looking for opportunities to contribute to open source projects, hit me up if you want to start something.

See you guys soon!

[Pacisb]

Hello everyone, my name is Pacis Bana, I am a grad student at Creighton University. This is my first R conference and I am very excited to see people I have been following on Twitter. I have very little experience with R, but I am trying to learn as much as I can. I was sad to miss day 0 of the Unconf, but I was happy to be in beautiful Tucson, AZ with giving my 6 days old niece as many kisses as I can.

My hope after this conference is that I start to use R from start data cleaning, to visualizations.

[yihui]

@Ranae I discovered that there is a ping pong table here at JDF!! I'd very much like to play. If anyone else is interested in playing table tennis, please feel free to let me know! 🏓

[Ranae]

@yihui, I'll bring my paddles!!!!

My laptop caught on fire on Friday. I just got a replacement and will soon start to installing everything I need for tomorrow. Maybe there is a lot of ping pong in my future???

[yihui]

@Ranae They have a full drawer of paddles here, but only of moderate qualities (the table is pretty decent, though). I guess your paddles are of higher quality. I'm more of a badminton player than ping pong now. I'm not sure if my ping pong skills would embarrass both you and myself. I used to play like crazy ever since I was in elementary school, but haven't played much after I came to the US ten years ago.

Good luck with reinstalling things!