Review: R Lightning Talks at R Users Meetup
If you like statistics, data analysis, and visual graphs, the DC R Users group delivered on Thursday, February 9th. They met at LivingSocial’s Chinatown location to cover a series of short presentations centering around R programming language use cases and resources.
The following topics were covered:
- Bayesian estimation with R and JAGS – Grant Cavanaugh
- arules package, apriori algorithm (Market Basket Analysis) – John Dennison
- Example of using R to query the google maps API to create a color-coded map of road and public transit times - James Leopore
- MCMC with Gibbs Sampling – Katya Vasilaky
- Webscraping with R, RCurl – Robert Vesco
- Git your Version Control on Using R and RStudio – Brian Danielak
- R’s spatial tools – Lee De Cola
12th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Call for Participation
This message is brought to you by the CSTA member listserv.
The 12th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women of Computing (GHC) has opened its Call for Participation. The annual conference, presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, is the world’s largest gathering of women in computing. The Grace Hopper Celebration will take place from October 3 – 6, 2012 at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, Maryland. This year’s theme “Are We There Yet?” recognizes that technology and the culture of technology are continuously evolving but there are also concrete goals we are striving to achieve.
Review: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
I finished reading The Lean Startup recently and found some profound insights on rapid product development with limited resources in unproven markets. I was impressed by the emphasis on the product and customer development, and not the organization that creates it. You could be a startup founder, employee number 10, or working for big business. It was also interesting to see how the scientific method and a scientific approach is being brought to the product startup scene.
In part 1, leap-of-faith assumptions were covered by explanations and examples:
The Leap of faith assumptions are the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis. These ideas give you your starting point to begin building your minimum viable product. The strategy is to create this product by iterating through a build-measure-learn feedback loop by expending as little development effort and general effort as possible. No feature creep, no nonessential features, period. Once your product is released, you measure quantitatively, how much traction it will likely gain in the market place through your current, new, and prospective customers. Once you have this feedback, you learn. These learning milestones are the focus, not project milestones or product milestones. The measure and learn steps, help focus the attention on actionable metrics. Without that focus, new startups tend to focus on vanity metrics and the illusion of growth, that can result from unsustainable marketing ploys that don’t bring value to the market place. Once you have these actionable metrics, you can decide to persevere or pivot from your original hypotheses.
DC ACM: Meeting Minutes 2011-10-24
DC ACM Volunteer and Board Meeting
2011-10-24
Radio Free Asia Read the rest of this entry
DC ACM: Meeting Minutes 2011-09-26
DC ACM Volunteer and Board Meeting
2011-09-26
Radio Free Asia Read the rest of this entry
LTE: CSEd Week 2011 12/4-10
Computer Science Education (CSEd) Week 2011 is December 4 thru 10:
We invite you to help celebrate the week and raise awareness of computer science education and computing careers. We encourage you to sign the pledge supporting CSEdWeek activities and events. Join with teachers, students, parents and others who are participating in CSEdWeek activities and events and pledge your support here (no donation required).
Here are some cool ideas to get the word out to others:
Schedule an event using the Event Toolkit and check out the videos on the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) website for help.
Contact your area high schools to schedule a presentation to CS, Math or Science students. Check out Programs-in-a-Box for examples of presentations.
Easy-to-do activities:
Create an email signature proclaiming your commitment to CS education.
“Like” CSEdWeek on Facebook and join the conversaion.
Blog, tweet, and post to spread the word and raise awareness using #CSEdWeek.
Put the CSEdWeek countdown widget on your website.
Send a letter to your local school board urging computer science as a core subject. Handy talking points at Computing in the Core and http://www.ncwit.org/schools.
If you post your plans on CSEdWeek Facebook, we will feature them in the CSEdWeek e-newsletter to all those who make a pledge on the CSEdWeek site.
LTE: CMG 2011 International Conference 12/5-12/9
Computer Measurement Group
37th International CMG Conference
December 5-9, 2011
Gaylord National Hotel- National Harbor, MD
100+ Presentations, Panels, and Workshops on Hot Topics such as Cloud Computing, Capacity Planning, SaaS, SOA, Performance Engineering & Load Testing
The Computer Measurement Group (CMG), a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals specializing in performance, capacity and service management has announced its preliminary conference program for this year’s 37th International Computer Measurement Group annual conference (CMG’11) taking place from December 5-9 at the Gaylord National Hotel in the Washington DC area.
The CMG’11 preliminary agenda is available online on the CMG website at http://www.cmg.org/cgi-bin/agenda_2011.pl. With an enhanced search tool, attendees can easily search the lineup of sessions by day of the week, subject area, experience level, and specific focus areas. Also available is a ‘Trip Report’ option that builds a trip report outline. By customizing it with a few comments, these trip reports can be a powerful argument for attending CMG’11 and justifying attendance to employers in these days of tight travel and training budgets.
The CMG’11 Highlights Brochure offers a concise summary of the main aspects of the conference – program structure, distinguished speakers, locations, and more. It is available at http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2011/CMG11-Highlights.pdf.
Registration for CMG’11 is now open (http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2011/reg.html). CMG’11 will feature some of the hottest topics in Performance and Capacity Planning. Subject areas include:
- Measurement and Tuning
- Modeling and Statistics
- Capacity Planning
- Performance Engineering and Load Testing
- Management and Reporting
Find out more information on their website: http://cmg.org/conference/cmg2011/
DC ACM: DC Nightowls Co-Working Group 11/30 @ 9pm
If you consider yourself to be a night owl and that your most productive hours are in the late evenings, come check out this upcoming event. Its a great opportunity to get some work done and collobrate with others. Bring your own laptop, pen and notepad, etc and make some new friends while you get some work done. This co-working group event is this Monday night at 9pm, at the ground floor conference room of Radio Free Asia.
For more info and to rsvp, go here:
LTE: AMIA Annual Symposium 10/22-10/26
AMIA 2011 Annual Symposium October 22-26, 2011
Improving Health: Informatics and IT Changing the World
The AMIA Annual Symposium is the world’s most comprehensive annual meeting on biomedical and health informatics. The Annual Symposium venue is the Washington Hilton, Washington, DC.
Location: Washington, DC Hilton – Washington Hilton
October 22, 2011 – October 26, 2011
Twitter: @AMIA2011
The AMIA Annual Symposium is the primary forum for the presentation of research and development related to the structure and management of data, and the design, implementation and evaluation of information systems in the field of biomedical and health informatics. I don’t remember during my 26 years of attending the Annual Symposium when the interest in Biomedical and Health Informatics has been greater than now. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Meaningful Use has stimulated the need for and access to health information technology (HIT). The ultimate purpose of Meaningful Use is to use HIT to improve patient care, which has always been a goal of AMIA. Many of us in the AMIA family will be involved with Meaningful Use. It is critical that we “team-up” and share our experiences to answer the remaining implementation and use questions on what is working and where we are seeing problems and barriers so we can use the vast knowledge base held by AMIA members to make sure we see and can measure the benefits of HIT and prevent the potential unintended consequences.
R. Scott Evans, MS, PhD, FACMI, AMIA 2011 Scientific Program Committee ChairThis doesn’t mean we should just focus on Meaningful Use and not keep doing what has made AMIA great. Our multidisciplinary field – in which we informaticians collaborate with computer scientists, clinicians, and others – has been impacted enormously by genomics, bioinformatics, pharmacology, consumer health, and public health. We need to continue to push HIT to new levels and use it to develop new methods to improve patient care, research, and public health. This knowledge and experience within AMIA is why its members are at the forefront of national HIT standards and policy committees and their input continues to be requested by government agencies and industry. AMIA’s strength – the close collaboration and exchange of ideas between applied and foundational researchers – has generated many ‘bench to bedside’ translational collaborations and tools in the past. This symposium will again provide room for cross-fertilization and the development of new and intelligent methods for HIT implementation that are so urgently needed. Likewise, AMIA’s larger footprint into global health presents a number of new opportunities and challenges to overcome.
New this year…the AMIA 2011 paper submissions page limit has been changed to 10 pages to provide authors with sufficient space to describe their research. The Symposium will also continue to include posters, panels, tutorials, workshops, theatre-style demonstrations, keynote speakers, special presentations by members of the American College of Medical Informatics, an “Informatics Year in Review”, overviews of new findings from the Joint Summits on Translational Science and Public Health and examples of innovative collaborations with industry. The Awards program will recognize distinguished papers, student papers, posters and signature achievements in biomedical and health informatics. The Symposium will also continue the “journal-eligible” program, which was started in 2008 and allows paper submissions to be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
I look forward to seeing you all in Washington DC this coming October and learning about the multitude of new and interesting studies and applications to improve healthcare.
LTE: Code4Country Codeathon, Sept 24th and 25th at AU
Dear DC ACM Chapter,
I am writing to pass on the news about an event that might be of interest to some DC ACM members. It is called Code4Country, a codeathon taking place on September 24/25 simultaneously in Moscow and Washington D.C. (at American University) focusing on using open source technologies and open data to address transparency challenges in the U.S. and Russia. It is basically tech-meets-international affairs in one marathon weekend with the intent to make information more accessible to American and Russian citizens using technology. We want to extend a particular invitation to your members to come out and participate, create some software, win some prizes and build some bridges between the U.S. and Russia. You can see some press coverage about Code4Country and a short blurb about the event below. For more info, check out www.code4country.org. Please spread the word and hope to see some of you there!
Best regards,
Elizabeth
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/moscow-and-washington-to-_b_956084.html
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