1 Why R? 2019 conference
Why R? conferences have been the hallmark of the Why R? Foundation (whyr.pl). Our goal has been to establish a series of international R-related events in Poland. After three years, we are happy to announce that our main event, the Why R? conference, has become one of the largest annual R conferences in Central Europe.
Why R? 2019 was the third part of Why R? conference event. After the last edition that was held in Wrocław (Burdukiewicz et al. 2018), our conference has returned to Warsaw. A total of approximately 300 people from 20 countries attended the main conference event. The event took place from 26th to 29th September 2019 and was co-organised by the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Warsaw (wne.uw.edu.pl/en/), a leading academic institution in Poland, having important achievements in quantitative methods and data science. We received major support from ML in PL Society (mlinpl.org), a group of young researchers, aiming to promote machine learning events in Poland, who shared their resources and experience to make the conference more accessible.
For the first time, this year the conference featured a language-agnostic data visualizations hackathon (whyr.pl/2019/hackathon). Such an event gives the Why R? community a chance to exchange experience and inspirations with the users of any other languages and tools.
2 Participants
In spite of the fact that Why R? events are aimed at experienced data science practitioners, each conference gathers a high percentage of students (around 30%). Our participants have very diverse scientific backgrounds, where mathematics (mainly statistics) and computer science are the most common. All of them have jobs related to data science, including professional R developers (programmers), data engineers, machine learning practitioners and business analysts. One of the key advantages of Why R? is that it gathers participants both from academia and the industry.
3 Conference program
The format of the conference was aimed at exposing participants to recent developments in the R language as well as a wide range of application examples. The event consisted of workshops, invited keynote talks, field-specific series of talks, lightning-talks, special interest groups and a full-day data visualizations hackathon. It offered extensive networking opportunities. The welcome party was held at the conference venue on the first day of lectures. In addition, many informal gatherings were organised during each conference day, as the event took place close to the Old Town.
To sum up, Why R? 2019 consisted of: one day of hackathon (60 attendees), one day of workshops (150 attendees), one evening of round tables, two days of lectures (250 attendees) and one evening Welcome paRty (100 attendees). In 2019 we hosted a total of 315 unique attendees. During lectures there were carried out: 6 keynote talks, 42 regular talks and 14 lightning talks. Below you can find the conference agenda.