The first ever RStudio conference was held January 11-14, 2017 in Orlando, FL. For anyone else like me who spends hours each working day staring into an RStudio session, the conference was truly excellent . The speaker lineup was diverse and covered lots of areas related to development in R, including the tidyverse, the RStudio IDE, Shiny, htmlwidgets, and authoring with RMarkdown.

This is a guest post from VP Nagraj, a data scientist embedded within UVA’s Health Sciences Library, who runs our Data Analysis Support Hub (DASH) service. Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in the first ever Shiny Developer Conference hosted by RStudio at Stanford University. I’ve built a handful of apps, and have taught an introductory workshop on Shiny.

I just returned from the Genome Informatics meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. This was, hands down, the best scientific conference I've been to in years. The quality of the talks and posters was excellent, and it was great meeting in person many of the scientists and developers whose tools and software I use on a daily basis.

Per tradition, Russ Altman gave his "Translational Bioinformatics: The Year in Review" presentation at the close of the AMIA Joint Summit on Translational Bioinformatics in San Francisco on March 26th.  This year, papers came from six key areas (and a final Odds and Ends category).  His full slide deck is available here.

A few weeks ago the 2014 AMIA Translational Bioinformatics Meeting (TBI) was held in beautiful San Francisco.  This meeting is full of great science that spans the divide between molecular and clinical research, but a true highlight of this meeting is the closing keynote, traditionally given by Russ Altman.

I archived and analyzed all Tweets containing #GI2013 from the recent Cold Spring Harbor Genome Informatics meeting, using my previously described code. Friday was the most Tweeted day.

I archived and anlayzed all Tweets with the hashtag #ASHG2013 using my previously mentioned code. Number of Tweets by date shows Wednesday was the most Tweeted day: The top used hashtags other than #ASHG2013: The most prolific users: And what Twitter analysis would be complete without the widely loved, and more widely hated word cloud: Edit 8:24am : I have gotten notes that some Tweets were not captured in this archive.

As the 2013 ISMB/ECCB meeting is winding down, I archived and analyzed the 2000+ tweets from the meeting using a set of bash and R scripts I previously blogged about. The archive of all the tweets tagged #ISMBECCB from July 19-24, 2013 is and will forever remain here on Github. You'll find some R code to parse through this text and run the analyses below in the same repository, explained in more detail in my previous blog post.

Automatically Archiving Twitter Results Ever since Twitter gamed its own API and killed off great services like IFTTT triggers, I've been looking for a way to automatically archive tweets containing certain search terms of interest to me. Twitter's built-in search is limited, and I wanted to archive interesting tweets for future reference and to start playing around with some basic text / trend analysis.

For over 15 years, members of the computer science, machine learning, and data mining communities have gathered in a beautiful European location each spring to share ideas about biologically-inspired computation.  Stemming from the work of John Holland who pioneered the field of genetic algorithms, multiple approaches have been developed that exploit the dynamics of natural systems to solve computational problems.