Presentations from UseR! 2009 online

Displaying yet more of the organizational efficiency displayed at the conference itself, the organizers of User! 2009 have already posted the slides for many of the presentations given in Rennes. There's a wealth of valuable material here for all R users. 

I'd like to point out a few personal favorites from those I saw, but with a caveat: given that I missed the entire first day, and that there were many parallel tracks, this is necessarily an eclectic list. I've certainly missed many gems -- please add your favourites to the comments.

• Jan Wijfell's presentation Prediction and Fuzzy Logic at ThomasCook to automate price settings of last minute offers. Check out the slide "Architectural Solution" on page 8 to see how R is a component in no less that five nodes of an automated workflow to optimize and distribute holiday package prices on a daily basis.  
• Markus Schmidberger gave a great overview of the state-of-the-art in parallel programming with R.  
• Trevor Hastie's invited lecture was a great round-up of recent advances in penalized linear and nonlinear models. (No-one can make a lecture with such complex concepts and so many matrix equations as entertaining and accessible as Trevor does. Seriously.) 
• My colleague Bryan Lewis applied his numerical analysis chops to identify some opportunities to seriously improve the performance of R in matrix decompositions.
• I really enjoyed Jim Porzak's application of Tuftean principles of information design to Web-based dashboards (and especially the sketch on slide 10).  
• I missed it at UseR! but saw the remix at DSC, and was blown away by the performance and interactivity of Simon Urbanek's iPlots eXtreme graphics system. 
• I missed many other talks that everyone I spoke to said were great: Jensen and Shah's talk about using a Wii Remote with R; Francois Romain's talk about the excellent work he's been doing with a jEdit front-end for R; Hadley Wickham's talk on model visualization with ggplot2; and Karim Chine's talk about using Biocep as a front-end to R sessions running in the cloud on Amazon EC2.

My slides on Parallel Programming with Iterators are also available, although as it turned out I didn't actually get to present them. (Bryan stepped in when flight delays meant I missed the first day of the conference.) I'll go into two of the examples in those slides -- how to create an infinite sequence of primes with iterators, and how you can speed up simulations with foreach and multicore, in blog posts in the next week or so. 

Oh, and for those that want to relive the atmosphere, photos from the four days of the conference have also been posted.

UseR! 2009: Presentations: Abstracts and Slides