by Joseph Rickert
The R Consortium, the non-profit trade organization formed under the Linux Foundation to support the R language and the R Community, is beginning to build real momentum. First of all, two new companies recently joined the Consortium: Avant which provides online personal and auto loans and Procogia, a consulting firm that helps companies make data-driven business decisions. Having companies join the R Consortium that are not directly involved in making R tools and extensions is an exciting development that shows that reach of R and its importance to data-driven business of all types.
Last month the R Consortium announced the results of the first broad call for proposals. The ISC funded 7 projects and 3 working groups. The projects included:
A unified Framework for doing distributed computing in R proposed by Michael Lawrence (an R core member) and Edward Ma and Indrajit Roy was awarded $10K. This project grew out of the workshop on distributed computing that was held at HP in January 2015. The immediate work is to build out the ddR package to include more algorithms and add more “back end” distributed platforms. However, since the project could have significant influence on future work on distributed computing it is also being organized as working group (See below.)
An effort proposed by Kirill Müller to improve the DBI interface was awarded $25K. The general idea is to create a DBI specification and centralized tests and boiler that will make it easier to connect to databases while improving the existing DBI interfaces RMySQL, RPostgress and RSQLite.
The creation of a one-day RIOT (R Implementation, Optimization and Tooling) workshop aimed at identifying R language development and tooling opportunities was awarded $10K. Proposed by Mark Hornick, Lucas Stadler and Adam Welc, it is focused on increasing the involvement of …read more
Source:: http://revolutionanalytics.com