Between 12th and 14th of September the Enterprise Application of R Language conference EARL took place in London.
Organized since many years by Mango Solutions EARL aims at bringing together Business and IT partners with core Business in diverse domains to discuss problems, solutions, and common experiences gathered with the commercial utilization of R in the productive environment. Mirai attends for the second year the European conference where Microsoft, Mango and members of the R consortium are among the key notes speakers.
Among the most important addressed topics, worth mentioning are the experiences shared about the replacement of Excel and SAS as productive tools with R. Reproducibility of results and traceability of the calculations are the biggest challenges when Excel is chosen even for simple models, while flexibility and complexity of the product together with its high costs are the problems related to the utilization of SAS. Companies have shown at EARL how they have transitioned not only their models to R but also their developers and analysts who have been properly trained internally and/or with the support of R specialists. The widespread utilization of tidyverse seems again to be the first choice for those users with scarce IT and programming background, while examples of productive Shiny applications have filled a good part of the conference’s agenda.
A big thanks to our friends of Mango Solutions for the conference organization and for the lovely evening boat trip along the Thames, we hope to be back at EARL in the upcoming years to present and share our experience.