openstatsware on UseR!2024 | R bloggers

The first in-person UseR! conference after the Covid pandemic took place from July 8 to 11, 2024 in Salzburg, Austria. Organized by Roche and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Munich) with support from the R Consortium and the Linux Foundation, this event brought together around 500 physical attendees as well as virtual participants and presenters. See here for the conference website which also links to the conference agenda (including downloadable slides, where provided by presenters) and free recordings. See also UseR! talks curated by rOpenSci.

By openstatsware present:

• Daniel Sabanés Bové (RCONIS)
• Friedrich Pahlke (RCONIS)
• Gregory Chen (MSD)
• Joseph Rickert (R-Consortium)
• Lars Andersen (Boehringer Ingelheim)
• Sergio Olmos (Sanofi)
• Will Landau (Lilly)
• Wilmar Igl (ICON)
• Yann Féat (mainanalytics)

Below, some of them will discuss the highlights of the conference and summarize their contributions to the conference.

Joseph: “The UseR! 2024 conference, organized by the R Foundation, Roche, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and funded by the R Consortium, was the first in-person event since 2019. It provided a much-needed opportunity for R users to build friendships and meet in person some of the greats in the R world, including Kurt Hornik, Uwe Ligges, and Simon Urbanek from the R Core Group and CRAN, and Peter Dalgaard, Tomas Kalibera, Martin Mächler, Luke Tierney from the R Core Group, and Hadley Wickham and others from his development team at Posit.”

Wilmar: “I attended my first UseR! conference in 2024 to present a personal project to promote citizen participation in political decision-making based on R/Shiny technology. The fact that this talk was accepted illustrates the openness of the community and the wide range of possible applications of R and related open source technologies in society. The conference covered a wide range of other topics in data science and statistics with too many (personal) highlights to mention. The UseR! conference was also special for me because I was able to meet many colleagues in real life, with whom I have been meeting virtually over the past year. Finally, one cannot write about the UseR! conference without mentioning the special atmosphere of a friendly, inclusive and fun environment, where you can also rub shoulders with long-standing champions and rising stars of the R community. UseR! will definitely be on the list of top conferences for the coming years!”

Yann: “The energy at this conference was incredible. It brought together established contributors to the R ecosystem and newcomers around topics that matter to me, such as software engineering, statistics, data visualization, reproducibility, etc. This made for interesting and diverse talks and more stimulating discussions than you can count. I myself had the chance to present the work of the Regulatory R Package Repository of the R Validation Hub and it was a pleasure to exchange ideas on this topic in person. I look forward to future UseR! conferences!”

Daniel: “I can hardly believe it, but this was indeed the first UseR! conference I attended. I feel honored to have been part of the organizing and program committee, so I contributed a little bit to the overall organization of the conference. It was absolutely amazing to meet so many R community members in person, many of whom I already knew by name or video. It was also very special to see many R core members mingling with the audience, giving comments, asking questions, and reminding us how R came to be in keynote presentations. I really hope there will be another UseR! conference soon (not in 5 years) and that I can attend it again. This time I gave a openstatsware workshop on good software engineering practices for R packages together with Friedrich, presented the {mmrm} package built by openstatswareand received feedback on the openstatsguide Through openstatsware in the poster session. It was great to see so many openstatsware to UseR! 2024 😁”

Friedrich: “Attending the UseR! 2024 conference in Salzburg was a truly enriching experience. This event marked my first in-person UseR! conference and it exceeded all my expectations. The conference provided an incredible platform to learn and connect with other R enthusiasts. It was especially rewarding to co-lead a 3.5-hour tutorial on ‘Good Software Engineering Practice for R Packages’ with Daniel Sabanés Bové. Our session focused on equipping attendees with essential tools and techniques for developing robust and reliable R packages, which was received with great enthusiasm. In addition to the tutorial, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on ‘Engineering a Reliable R Package for Regulatory Use Using {rpact} as an example.’ This lecture gave me the opportunity to reflect on the six-year journey of developing the {rpact} package, a tool that is crucial for confirmatory adaptive clinical trials. I discussed how our validation framework, inspired by GAMP 5 principles, has been instrumental in achieving high levels of automation and reliability, and ensuring compliance with stringent regulatory standards. As a co-founder of RCONIS, our new joint venture that also sponsored the conference, it was an honor to contribute to this fantastic event. In addition to my official roles, I also enjoyed capturing memorable moments as a conference photographer. The whole experience left me eagerly looking forward to future UseR! conferences and the continued growth of the R community.”

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