We start the year with #Rstats and we couldn’t be more enthusiastic about our invited speakers!

For January’s edition of #Bioinformatics London we are revisiting reproducible workflows but this time the discussion will revolve around the R ecosystem.

See the full description of the event here: meetup.com/Bioinformatics-London

There will be two talks followed by QA:

TALK 1: Reproducible reporting and putting research code into production with the {orderly} R package

Speaker: Rich FitzJohn, PhD - Research Software Engineer at MRC Centre for Global Disease Analysis, Imperial College London

Rich FitzJohn will start his talk outlining some practical reasons why reproducibility remains a challenge for analysis, why existing reproducible research solutions miss important challenges for scientists and analysts, and draw analogies with the emergence of "structured programming".

The second part of the talk will introduce the {orderly} package, which aims to address the concerns raised. Importantly, rather than focusing on how a scientist implements a particular analysis, {orderly} establishes conventions around inputs and outputs of analysis, then borrows ideas from git and docker to carry out the analysis in a somewhat isolated way, with the result that research inputs and outputs are always easily associated.

TALK 2: Reproducible workflows in R with the {drake} R package

Speaker: Matt Dray, PhD - Data Scientist, Cabinet Office

Matt Dray in the first part of his talk will explain what a workflow manager is and why you need one (spoilers: to reduce error and improve reproducibility). The second part will explain why the {drake} package by Will Landau is a great solution (spoilers: it's R-specific, handles distributed computing and has great documentation). 'What gets done stays done!'

Approximate schedule:

18.30: doors open
18.45: chitchat, announcements
19.00 - 19.30: TALK 1, Rich FitzJohn
19.35 - 20.05: TALK 2, Matt Dray

Please make a sure to have a (digital) copy of your ticket to pass through building security.