[R] Revolutions blog: February 2018 roundup

[David Smith (CDA)]

Since 2008, Microsoft staff and guests have written about R at the Revolutions
blog (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com) and every month I post a summary of
articles from the previous month of particular interest to readers of r-help.

In case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the
month of February:

The R Consortium opens a new round of grant applications for R-related user
groups and projects
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/r-consortium-sponsorships.html and
has granted US$0.5M for projects to date
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/r-consortium-milestone.html

Microsoft R Client 3.4.3 and Microsoft ML Server 9.3, both built with R 3.4.3,
have been released: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/mrclient343.html

An 8-step, 5-minute tutorial for setting up a cluster in Azure for use with
the sparklyr package: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/aztk-sparklyr.html

A smartphone app uses R and the keras package to identify "spells" using
accelerometer data
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/accelerometers.html

"Machine Learning with R and Tensorflow", JJ Allaire's keynote presentation at
RStudio::conf http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/r-with-tensorflow.html

A guide to styling base graphics in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/pretty-base-graphics.html

A list of applications, open source projects, and extensions from Microsoft
related to R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/what-does-microsoft-do-with-r.html

Several upcoming R conferences offer diversity scholarships:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/diversity-scholarships.html

Introducing the DataExplorer package, for quick data summaries and
visualizations: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/dataexplorer.html

A video overview of the Data Science Virtual Machine, featuring R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/dsvm-on-ai-show.html

"Asking the right questions about AI", an essay about the ethical implications
of predictions
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/how-ai-works-and-fails.html

And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R):

*  A sci-fi short about faster-than-light travel:
   http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/because-its-friday-faster-than-light.html

* A robot holds a door open so another robot can pass:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/because-its-friday-hold-the-door.html

* SpaceX launches a car into space:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/because-its-friday-bon-voyage-starman.html

* A bizarre CGI short film, Time for Sushi:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/02/because-its-friday-time-for-sushi.html

As always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions to
me at davidsmi at microsoft.com or via Twitter (I'm @revodavid).

Cheers,
# David

-- 
David M Smith <davidsmi at microsoft.com>
Developer Advocate, Microsoft Cloud & Enterprise 
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com