Unless otherwise indicated, all posts are authored by a member of the Microsoft team. (Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics in April 2015.) Regular contributors include:
David Smith (editor-in-chief): David is the R Community Lead at Microsoft. After graduating with a degree in Statistics from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, David spent four years researching statistical methodology at Lancaster University (United Kingdom), where he also developed a number of packages for the S-PLUS statistical modeling environment. David continued his association with S-PLUS at Insightful (now TIBCO Spotfire) where for more than eight years he oversaw the product management of S-PLUS and other statistical and data mining products. David is the co-author (with Bill Venables) of the tutorial manual An Introduction to R, one of the originating developers of ESS: Emacs Speaks Statistics, and a member of the board of the R Consortium. You can follow David on Twitter as @revodavid. (Posts without a byline are by David.)
Andrie de Vries: Andrie is a Programme Manager in the Algorithms and Data Science team of Microsoft Advanced Analytics, based in London. At Microsoft, he has worked on a range of products, including R Open, R Server, MRAN, R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) and Jupyter notebooks in Azure Machine Learning Studio. Andrie joined Microsoft during the acquisition of Revolution Analytics, having joined in 2013 to help grow and build Revolution's presence in Europe. Prior to joining Revolution Analytics, he set up a boutique market research firm, offering survey design, analytics and marketing insight. He worked in a variety of industries, such as high-tech manufacturing, food retail and social media. He used R for marketing analytics, for example customer segmentation, market sizing and forecasting, true driver analysis and conjoint analysis. Andrie is co-author of the book R for dummies, the book that helps everyone getting started with R, regardless of prior programming knowledge. He is also a regular contributor to the question and answer site StackOverflow.
Bill Jacobs: Bill is Revolution Analytics’ VP of Product Marketing. Bill brings a rich perspective on Big Data infrastructure and analytics developed over the past ten years working for companies including IBM/Netezza and Pivotal, and has helped users pioneer Big Data analytics for telecom, financial services, health and life sciences, retail, manufacturing and insurance companies.
Derek Norton: Derek is a Senior Sales Engineer at Revolution Analytics based in Atlanta, GA. Coming to Revolution Analytics was a dream come true for him: it has allowed him to help others learn about R on a scale not previously possible (and use SAS a lot less). Derek’s prior work experience also had a strong consulting focus, providing expertise in a variety of areas ranging from developing models for fraud prediction for Jewelry Television to developing a fully automated modeling system for IHG. The common thread throughout was bringing advanced analytics and machine learning models, for a variety of applications from marketing to credit scoring, to the client in easily understood and actionable terms. Derek also has a passion for the R language, and has presented at multiple international UseR conferences on topics such as automated modeling and building an R presence in a SAS environment. Derek has a BS and MS in Statistics focusing on Financial Econometrics and Data Mining, and a PhD in Statistics focused on Data Mining. He is also the founder and director of the Atlanta R Users Group. In his spare time, Derek enjoys gourmet cooking, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and spending time with his family.
Alumni
Former authors, with their bios as they appeared at the time of their contributions
Thomas W. Dinsmore: Thomas is Director of Product Management for Revolution Analytics. Prior to joining Revolution Analytics, Thomas was an Analytics Solution Architect in IBM Big Data Solutions, where he helped clients build analytic enterprises with IBM PureData System for Analytics (Powered by Netezza). Over the past 25 years he has led or contributed to analytic solutions for more than five hundred clients across vertical markets and around the world. Although his roots are in hands-on customer analytics, in the past fifteen years Thomas has expanded the scope of his experience to include analytic software applications and broader solutions including database integration and web applications. As a project lead, he has worked with DB2, Oracle, Netezza, SQL Server and Teradata. Thomas is certified in SAS, and has working experience with the leading analytic tools available in the market today, including R, SPSS, and Oracle Data Mining.
Joseph Rickert (guest-blog editor): Joe is a Program Manager and R Community Ambassador for Microsoft. He came to Microsoft with the rest of Revolution Analytics team where he worked as a data scientist, blog editor and special programs manager. Previously, Joe held a variety of technical and marketing roles while working for technology startups that spanned multiple industries from local area networks to disk drives, test equipment and healthcare. Joe entered Franklin & Marshall college on a Classics scholarship and end up a Math major. He also earned an M.A. in Humanities and an M.S. in Statistics from the California State University. Joe's main interest in blogging is to tell the story of R and the vibrant, world-wide community that makes R happen. You can follow Joe on Twitter as @RevoJoe.
