This document summarizes lessons learned from attending the Budapest Users of R Network Meetup. It discusses three main aspects: professional, educational, and personal. Professionally, interesting R packages for interactive visualization like loon and vdmR were discovered. Educationally, teaching sessions and lightning talks provided ideas for using R, RStudio, and Docker in statistics education. Personally, networking and experiences from the poster session were beneficial. The meetup exposed the attendee to a wide range of applications of R across different domains.

1. Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem
Méréstechnika és Információs Rendszerek Tanszék
Lessons learned at
Ágnes Salánki
salanki@mit.bme.hu
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Budapest Users of R Network Meetup
13 July 2015

2. Lessons learned
Professional aspect: interactive visualization
• Interesting packages: loon, vdmR
• Experiences from the keynote and the tutorial
Educational aspect
• Teaching sessions
• Lightning talks
Personal aspect
• Experiences from the poster session
• Networking
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3. Interactive visualization
 Dianne Cook’s keynote
o „eighty-seven steps forward for data analysis but
twelve steps backwards for interactive graphics”
o Focus on reproducible research
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4. Interactive visualization
 Dianne Cook’s keynote
o „eighty-seven steps forward for data analysis but
twelve steps backwards for interactive graphics”
o Focus on reproducible research
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5. Interactive visualization
 Tessera tutorial
o Divide&combine approach for computaitons on
distributed data frames (ddfs)
o Visualization based on Trelliscope
 Packages
o vdmR
• Linked highlighting on basic ggplot2 plots
o Loon
• ~Mondrian, iplots package, etc.
• ca. 10.000 data points
• Extremely good programmability
• Subscription as Beta tester: http://navgraph.com/loon/
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6. Education aspect
 Colin Rundel: Teaching R using the Github ecosystem
o Reproducible research: knitr, make
o Feedback, grading, coding, etc. on Github
 Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel: Using R, RStudio, and Docker for
introductory statistics teaching
o How to learn R: GUI first, slowly remove handholding
 Michael Höhle: Zombie preparedness
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10. Personal aspect
 Poster session
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11. Personal aspect
 Poster session
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Professor: Have you used flag X by plotting?
Me: Nope, I have used the default setup.
Professor: Well, you should have.
Me: ???
Professor: Actually, I am the author of that package and I can see
from this far that your plot is wrong.
Me: (Auch.) Professor Mächler, it is a pleasure to meet you.

12. Personal aspect
 Poster session
 Still open question: visualization of large density
differences? 
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Professor: Have you used flag X by plotting?
Me: Nope, I have used the default setup.
Professor: Well, you should have.
Me: ???
Professor: Actually, I am the author of that package and I can see
from this far that your plot is wrong.
Me: (Auch.) Professor Mächler, it is a pleasure to meet you.

13. Networking
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14. General impressions
 Extremely mixed
o Keynote speakers
• Data management
• Visualization
• Bioinformatics
• Geospatial analytics
• Business-related applications
• Hard-core statistics
 Lots of friendly people 
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