Joint Stat Soc/Sydney Users of R Forum Talk: FitzJohn -- Reproducible Research using R (and other tools)

Tuesday evening’s Statistical Society NSW Talk is being held jointly with SURF (Sydney
Users of R Forum).  As usual, we have refreshments at 6pm and the talk at 6.30pm, with
the opportunity to join the speaker for dinner afterwards.  

The details appear below.  

Cheers, 

Michael 

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Venue: The University of Technology Sydney, Building 4, Level 2, Room 34, CB04.02.34,
Corner of Harris St.  & Thomas St., Ultimo, NSW 2007.  

Speaker: Dr Rich FitzJohn 

Title: Reproducible Research using R (and other tools) 

Reproducibility in research is increasingly called for, but carrying it out remains a
challenge.  I will give a tour through the tools used in a recent real-life research
project where we attempted to make the project reproducible from data acquisition to
generating the manuscript.  These tools include the R packages "knitr" (for generating
reports directly from R output) and "packrat" (for dependency management), as well as
tools outside of R: make for pipeline management, git for version control, and travis
for continuous testing of the research.  Our experience shows both the potential
benefits of reproducible research, but also the challenges remaining in implementing
it.  

Biography of Dr. Rich FitzJohn: Rich FitzJohn is a computational biologist, currently
based at Macquarie University.  His research interests are about reconstructing trait
evolution and diversification over millions of years.  He has been using R in a research
context for 10 years, and is the author of a number of packages for evolutionary
analysis.  He also teaches R skills through Software Carpentry.