We run an occasional series here on Revolutions called The R-Files, in which we profile members of the R community. Our intention with this series is to call out noteworthy work being done for open-source R and popular CRAN packages, and shine a light on some of the noteworthy individuals that make up what is now a broad community of contributors to R. While this blog is the creation of Revolution Analytics, the R-Files aims to profile contributors from the wider R community.
With that being said, we’d like to open a call for nominations for upcoming R-Files features. If there’s a specific member of the R community whom you feel should be recognized for their efforts developing R, a certain package, or contributing to the overall growth of R, we welcome you to nominate them in the comment thread below. If you'd prefer to nominate via email, you can send suggestions to [email protected]. You can see previous profiles from the series at the link below.
Revolutions: The R-Files
Would the organizers of R Meetup groups be included in the consideration set? Their impact on the development of a community is probably comparable to that of most package developers, though with a broad and diffuse, rather than narrow and concentrated, effect.
JCS
Posted by: Jose Camoes Silva | March 09, 2011 at 16:57
The first name which came to my mind was Michael Lawrence (author of RGtk2 and cairoDevice).
The R-Files gave me an impression about the age of members (restricted to the younger?); not sure if this is true.
Posted by: Yihui | March 09, 2011 at 20:06
Maybe whoever's responsible for RStudio?
Posted by: David | March 09, 2011 at 21:18
I would like to see Douglas Bates (nlme, lme4), Deepayan Sarkar (lattice, I'm a bit tired of so much coverage for ggplot2), Jarrod Hadfield (MCMCglmm) and Martyn Plummer (JAGS).
Posted by: Luis | March 09, 2011 at 23:46
The obvious choice would be to feature the members of the R Core group. By now the R-files series does not include ANY (!!!) of the R Core members. I do not want to downsize the contributions of the fine gentlemen that were featured (Dirk and Hadley especially), but relative to R Core this seems to be out of proportion.
Fire-up R, type contributors(), and you can start alphabetically.
Posted by: michal | March 10, 2011 at 04:34
My vote goes to Duncan Temple Lang (http://www.stat.ucdavis.edu/~duncan/)!
The Omegahat project (http://www.omegahat.org/) leaded by Duncan Temple is one of the jewels in the R Crown!
Posted by: Paolo | March 10, 2011 at 07:02
Thanks for the nominations! Please keep them coming.
JCS -- Yes, I think user group organizers would qualify, please do nominate any organizer you feel has made a significant contribution to the R community.
Yihui -- There's no age limit, please nominate anyone you feel deserves recognition, regardless of age.
Posted by: David Smith | March 10, 2011 at 09:31
Michal -- I totally agree that the R-core members should be included in the series.
Posted by: David Smith | March 10, 2011 at 09:40
I'd second the recommendation for Michael Lawrence (originally proposed by Jose Camoes Silva).
In addition to RGtk2 and cairoDevice, he is also quite active in developing (other) instrumental packages in the Bioconductor universe.
Now that Bioconductor has been brought up (*grin*), there are several people there that deserve mention:
There are more people that should be added to the list and have provided great value to the bioconductor ecosystem, but I guess I'll stop there ...
Posted by: Steve Lianoglou | March 10, 2011 at 11:47
Thomas Lumley
Posted by: Patrick McCann | March 15, 2011 at 10:20
I'd vote for Brian Ripley, whose books have helped me enormously.
Posted by: Blaise F Egan | March 15, 2011 at 13:40
Brian Ripley, unnecessary to list their contributions
Posted by: Washington S. Silva | April 14, 2011 at 15:12
Dirk Eddelbuettel and Romain Francois for Rcpp. Simon Urbanek for multicore and (tirelessly) being the R for Mac guy.
Posted by: Anirban Mukherjee | April 15, 2011 at 00:48
I second Simon Urbanek and Deepayan Sarkar.
Luis, I second being tired of all the over-hype ggplot2 gets.
Posted by: Doug | April 15, 2011 at 13:31