Come find us at useR!2021

What is useR2021?

useR! conferences are non-profit conferences organized by community volunteers for the community, supported by the R Foundation. - useR! 2021 organization

In my own words: useR conferences are events organized by people in the R community carefully designed to serve the R community as a whole, including as many of the different “sectors’’ as possible. This year even more so than in years prior because, the organizers took the challenge of having to organize an online event and turned it into an opportunity to work on a conference that is global by design, both in audience and leadership.

Thanks to the online nature of useR!2021, participants will have access to tutorials, keynotes, chats, video calls and a bunch of other resources that are deliberately curated for R users in the widest sense of the word. Accessibility has been front-of-mind to be as inclusive as possible, and these kinds of spaces are what makes the R community so beautiful: the shared desire to collaborate and help others in their R-journey.

This year, useR!2021 will take place online, from July 5 to July 9. ixpantia will be there in the following spots on the conference calendar.

In the Virtual Sponsor Booth - we welcome you to come and say hello in the sponsor booth any day of the conference. At the Data Pipelines at scale with R and Kubernetes tutorial on Wednesday July 8. During the talk Automating business processes with R by Frans van Dunné.

Why I´m so excited

I love data science, since my third year of college I knew this is what I wanted to do, so you can imagine how exciting it is for me to share a (virtual) space with more than a thousand other data lovers. Part of the beauty of data science, for me, is its intrinsic diversity and interdisciplinary nature. Diversity is what makes data science so powerful, joining the ideas and perspectives of people coming from different backgrounds and fields help create the wonderful products data science is capable of providing.

useR!2021 is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this diversity, to hear what people in totally different fields are doing with R and other data science tools and use that knowledge to complement what you are doing in your day to day. You could be stuck on a problem for a long time and just hearing someone from a different discipline than yours talk about how they are solving their problems could shift your perspective and help you solve whatever you were trying to solve.

And also just sharing and hearing anecdotes and struggles about our work as data scientists is liberating. It makes you feel part of a community and this is helpful, especially on those days where you feel incapable of doing something. Just knowing that other people go through the same (and even more) hardships than you can help you keep going.

ixpantia’s role in UseR2021

As a said in the description of this post, I’m excited to participate in useR!2021 not just as an individual but also as a part of ixpantia’s team. We are gold sponsors of the conference and have participated in the organization of the conference. We are also on the calendar with a tutorial and talk during the event.

Our part of the organization focused on the of the communication infrastructure for useR!2021. This infrastructure plays a big role in the efforts of making this the most accessible useR conference ever. It was carefully designed to make sure anyone can engage with other participants during the event. This is truly a global conference, with 3 official languages (english, spanish and portuguese) and participants from more than 122 countries..

We are also part of the activities held during the event, on the third day of the conference, July 7, we are giving a tutorial about Data Pipelines at scale with R and Kubernetes. I’m especially excited about this part because the tutorial was sold out and we will have the opportunity to interact with 40 participants and actually create something with them that I think will be helpful for their data science journey.

Also, Frans is going to give a talk on Automating business processes with R. It’s a short 20 minute presentation that highlights a business case and may surprise you with a different perspective of what R can do to add value to organizations.

Being part of the community as an organization

I personally like to be an active member of the data science community, that’s why I’m part of the RLadies SJO and Data Latam. To work in an organization like ixpantia that gets involved with the community and tries to make a contribution to it, fills me with great pride. I think my coworker, Magdiel Ablán summed it up perfectly:

It’s really cool to be part of the R community, the help you receive everyday from people all around the world helps you keep pushing through and to be a part of an organization (ixpantia) that allows you to give back at a high level like this, is a source of pride and feels like a luxury.