Food for thought in New York

As a growing in-house agency, we are willing to travel far and wide to keep up to date with the latest in the digital world, which is why we sent our Data Science lead, Chris, and Senior Data Scientist, Jon, to The Big Apple for a whole 51 hours! Chris shares with us his insights from the ‘New York R Conference’ and more importantly, the all-American lunch menu.

“Senior Data Scientist, Jon Stott, and I had the chance to travel to New York in May to attend the New York R Conference. As Data Scientists, R is a statistical programming language we use for much of our work here at MAG-O and having the opportunity to get involved with the event allowed us to get up close (and personal) with some of the leading lights of the #rstats community.

After arriving at the Conference, we were met with quite the array of food. The variety and quality, with a particular focus on traditional New Yorker cuisine, was definitely one of the best things about the whole event!

A few Data Science insights we took home from the conference:

The reproducibility of Data Science output and sharing that output with non-technical users.

It was good to hear how others have struggled with this and what their solutions have been, as it’s all well and good doing the best Data Science in world but if you can’t communicate that and affect a material change in the business it’ll be for naught. The presentation of a new Softward package called “dedoc” by Noam Ross actually got gasps and applause from the crowd!

“Putting R into production”.

This means finding ways for our Data Science coding to directly interact with things like databases, the internet and other computer systems. R hasn’t been associated with doing this well but over the last few years the barriers to this have been getting lower and lower.

Seeing the wide variety of applications of R was a real inspiration.

From using Twitter and Google to track fires in NYC, to Neuroimaging Analysis and using Deep Learning to generate amusing pet names, there was a lot of food for thought!

Overall it was a fantastic experience and getting to see in-person some of the Data Scientists you only follow on Twitter is something we gained a real benefit from. Jon also managed to fit in a bit of sightseeing and I managed to do a couple of fantasy runs around the city.

A big thanks to Jared Lander and the team from Lander Analytics for putting on a great event.

We’d love to go again (hint hint)”.

You can find a great recap of the conference at:  https://www.jaredlander.com/2019/05/data-scientists-converge-for-the-5th-annual-new-york-r-conference/