Revolutions

Thursday: Tweet-chat on Multiple Sclerosis research

The story about the great work that SUNY Buffalo has been doing to find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis with Revolution R Enterprise and IBM Netezza has generated a lot of attention, with stories in Forbes, InformationWeek and eWeek (amongst others). To continue the discussion, IBM has put together a panel for a "Tweet Chat" on Thursday (May 10) at noon Eastern time. I'll be there with the lead researcher Murali Ramanathan, Shawn Dolley from IBM and Tim Coetzee from the National MS Society. We'll be chatting about the search for a cure for MS, Big Data and analytics, in snippets of 140 characters or less. Join the conversation by following the #IBMDataChat hashtag at twitter.com or in your favourite Twitter client.

When: Thursday, May 10, 2012 from 12:00-1:00 p.m. ET (find your local time)
Where: Twitter hashtag #IBMDataChat
Who: 

• Shawn Dolley, IBM VP of Big Data Healthcare & Life Sciences (Moderator), @shawndolley
• Dr. Murali Ramanathan, SUNY Buffalo Professor Pharmaceutical Sciences and Neurology, Director of Graduate Studies & Co-Director, Data Intensive Discovery Initiative,@M_Ramanathan
• David Smith, Revolution Analytics R Evangelist & VP of Marketing, @revodavid
• Tim Coetzee, National MS Society Chief Research Officer, @tim_coetzee

Rmetrics financial engineering workshop

For those looking for an in-depth workshop on financial engineering with R, look no further than the R/Rmetrics Workshop and Summer School held annually in beautiful Meielisalp, Switzerland. This is an intimate workshop limited to around 50 participants, and features tutorials from leading practitioners in finance with R. This year's workshop takes plase June 24-28. You can find the announcement from the Rmetrics Foundation below, and you can register for the workshop here:

Rmetrics Foundation: Registration: Meielisalp 2012

Revolution Analytics Spring Webinar Series

The webinar team at Revolution Analytics has put together a great program over the next couple of months. With a mix of guest speakers and Revolution Analytics staff, this series will cover topics as diverse as Big Data with R and Hadoop, integrating R with MS Office, spatial statistics with R, data mining with R, retail marketing analytics, and much more. Here's the just-announced program:

April 25: How Big Data is Changing Retail Marketing Analytics (John Wallace and Brandon Mason, UpStream Software)

May 2: R + Hadoop = Big Data Analytics (Antonio Piccolboni, Revolution Analytics)

May 8: Calling All Data Scientists and Web Developers! Integrate Your Advanced Analytics into BI Apps and MS Office and Multiply Their Value (David Champagne, Revolution Analytics)

May 30: Getting Up to Speed with R: Certificate Program in R for Statistical Analysis, Visualization and Modeling (Peter Bruce, Statistics.com)

June 5: Introduction to R for Data Mining (Joseph Rickert, Revolution Analytics)

June 13: Finding Meaning in Points, Areas and Surfaces: Spatial Analysis in R (David Unwin, Statistics.com)

June 20: Revolution R Enterprise - 100% R and More (David Smith, Revolution Analytics)

Click on the webinar title above for more details and for free registration, or follow the link below for the complete program and links to replays of archived webinars.

Revolution Analytics: Spring Webinar Series

 

 

 

Compete in the Data Science Hackathon, April 28

All around the world at noon GMT on April 28, data scientists around the world will compete in the world's first one-day International Data Science Hackathon, organized by Data Science London. Participants will receive a data set at the beginning of the event, and work in teams of 3-5 over the following 24 hours to create the best predictive model from the data. Team members will meet in person in locations around the world including London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Berlin, Boston, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Participants can also compete remotely via the Kaggle website.

This is a great competition for R users, and the big-data capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise (available free to Kaggle competitors) are sure to be helpful here too. 

You can find more details about the Hackathon, including registration information, at the link below.

Data Science London: DSL12 Data Science Hackathon

 

R/Finance 2012 program announced, registration open

Registration is now open for R/Finance 2012 in Chicago, the conference devoted to applications of R in the financial sector. The program has also been announced, with topics including: modelling insurance claim reserves; risk management in power markets; peer performance of hedge funds; hedging event risk; operational risk measurement with R and RevoScaleR; and many other applications of R. Here's conference announcement from the organizers:

The registration for R/Finance 2012 -- which will take place May 11 and 12 in Chicago -- is NOW OPEN!

Building on the success of the three previous conferences in 2009, 2010, and 2011, we expect more than 250 attendees from around the world.  R users from industry, academia, and government will join 40+ presenters covering all areas of finance with R.

This year's conference will start earlier in the day on Friday, to accommodate the tremendous line up of speakers for 2012, as well as to provide more time between talks for networking.

We are very excited about the four keynotes by Paul Gilbert, Blair Hull, Rob McCulloch, and Simon Urbanek.  The main agenda includes nineteen full presentations and eighteen shorter "lightning talks". We are also excited to offer six optional pre-conference seminars on Friday morning.

Once again, we are hosting the R/Finance conference dinner on Friday evening, where you can continue conversations while dining and drinking atop a West Loop restaurant overlooking the Chicago skyline.

More details of the agenda are available at:

  http://www.RinFinance.com/agenda/

Registration information is available at

  http://www.RinFinance.com/register/

and can also be directly accessed by going to

  http://www.regonline.com/RFinance2012

On behalf of the committee and sponsors, we look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

  Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

Our 2012 Sponsors:

  International Center for Futures and Derivatives at UIC

  Revolution Analytics
  Sybase
  MS-Computational Finance at University of Washington

  Google
  lemnica
  OpenGamma
  OneTick
  RStudio
  Tick Data

To register to attend R/Finaince 2012, follow the link below.

R/Finance 2012 - Applications of R in Finance: Registration 

Dr Sanjiv Das presents "Using R for Analyzing Loans, Portfolios and Risk"

In a free webinar tomorrow at 10AM Pacific, Professor of Finance Dr Sanjiv Das will present, "Using R for Analyzing Loans, Portfolios and Risk: From Academic Theory to Financial Practice". I saw a version of Dr Das's talk a couple of months ago at the Bay Area R User Group meeting, and it was outstanding. I particularly recall his analysis to find the best method to modify a home loan facing foreclosure: is it better to forgive some of the principal, or to lower the interest rate? (This analysis was used to design some of the government's home loan mortgage modification incentives.) If you're interested in R and finance, or simply want to learn more about some of the factors behind the home mortgage crisis, this is not to be missed. The full agenda is below, and you can register for the webinar at the link below.

Dr. Sanjiv Das has held positions as at Citibank, Harvard University Professor and Program Director at the FDIC’s Center for Financial Research. His research relies heavily on R for analysis and decision-making. In this webinar, Dr. Das will present a mix of some of his more current and topical research that uses R-based models, and some pedagogical applications of R. He will present:

• An R-based model for optimizing loan modifications on distressed home loans, and the economics of these modifications.
• A goal-based portfolio optimization model for investors who use derivatives.
• Using network modeling tools in R to detect systemically risky financial institutions.
• Using R for web delivery of financial models and random generation of pedagogical problems.

Promising to be entertaining and enlightening, this webinar will emphasize the interplay of mathematical models, economic problems, and R.

Revolution Analytics webinars: Using R for Analyzing Loans, Portfolios and Risk: From Academic Theory to Financial Practice

Last chance for early-bird registations to useR! 2012

If you're planning to attend the international R user conference useR! 2012 in Nashville, TN in June, today is the last day to register and get a discounted registration. (And don't forget to check out the tutorials when you register.) Details at the useR! site linked below.

useR! 2012: Registration

Strata 2012 begins; R books on sale

I'm at the Strata 2012 conference in Santa Clara today and tomorrow (Revolution Analytics is a sponsor and giving talks). Wifi service looks pretty good so far, so I'll blog when I can. In the meantime, in recognition of the conference, several O'Reilly Media books on data and analytics are 50% off today and tomorrow, including several R-related books: R in a Nutshell, Getting Started with R, R Cookbook, Getting Started with Rstudio, Data Mashups in R, and Parallel R. The discounted books are available at the link below.

O'Reilly Media: Data Development and Resources

Webinar tomorrow: Big-data statistics with Revolution R with IBM Netezza

As explained in detail by Michele Chambers at the IBM Netezza blog, there are two keys to getting fast performance with statistical analysis on massive data sets with R:

1. Massive parallelization: break the problem down into small pieces, and run them in parallel
2. Bring the R engine to the data (not the other way around), to avoid data transfer delays

In a live webinar tomorrow, Wednesday February 29 (at 11AM Pacific), IBM Netezza's William Zanine and Revolution Analytics' Derek Norton will demonstrate this principle in action, with Revolution R Enterprise for IBM Netezza. Here's the description of the webinar:

Everyone involved in high-stakes analytics wants power, speed and flexibility regardless of the size of the data set and complexity of the analysis. Trailblazing organizations that have deployed IBM Netezza Analytics with their IBM Netezza data warehouse appliances (TwinFin) with Revolution R Enterprise are getting all three. Register for this webinar to find out how.

To set the stage, we'll provide a brief overview of the "R" statistical analysis language, the Revolution R Enterprise framework (with R at its core) as well in-database analytics on IBM Netezza Analytics Appliances. We'll be talking about what Revolution Analytics brings to IBM Netezza, and vice versa.

Then, we'll complete a model-building exercise from start to finish using the combined Revolution R Enterprise and IBM Netezza solution and demonstrate the performance and flexibility of the integrated offer. Join us as we:

• Begin with data visualizations and summary statistics to gain an understanding of our data 
• Split the data into training and test sets for model building
• Build models and
• Measure accuracy on both our training and test set and visualize the results.

Register today to learn why leveraging the Revolution R Enterprise and IBM Netezza analytics framework delivers power, speed and flexibility in a modern analytics platform. 

To register for the webinar (or if you're reading this after the live session, to find the slides and replay links), follow the link below.

Revolution Analytics webinars: Turbo-Charge Your Analytics with IBM Netezza and Revolution R Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Approach for Acceleration and Innovation

Revolution Analytics at Strata 2012

One of my favourite conferences, Strata: Making Data Work, starts tomorrow in Santa Clara, CA. Revolution Analytics is a proud sponsor, and I'll be there with the team to listen to some great talks and to meet other R users at our booth in the exhibition hall. There will be several R-related talks and tutorials during the conference, including two from the Revolution team as detailed in the announcement below:

Over the past year, "big data" has emerged as perhaps the single most significant trend in enterprise IT. Organizations are generating massive volumes of data on a daily basis and must properly process and analyze it for better operational insight. The R statistical language has concurrently emerged as a leading tool for big data analysis, due to its modern, flexible nature and unparalleled processing power.

Join Joseph Rickert of Revolution Analytics at 9:00 AM on February 28 at the O'Reilly Strata Conference for an in-depth overview of how R can be effectively used for data mining. His talk will include a comprehensive overview of R and how it can be properly leveraged for advanced statistical analysis for data sets of all sizes. Additionally, Antonio Piccolboni will be presenting on how R and Hadoop have been effectively integrated for big data analysis at 10:40 AM on February 29.

See you there!

Strata 2012: Schedule