[FoxPUG] August meeting

[Christian Long]

Hi,


Here are my notes from our August meeting. thanks to everyone who came out!

Christian


FoxPUG meeting notes

August 3, 2015

Tonight we were joined by a new person, Charles. We met first at the
Appleton Civic Hackathon. He told us about the new Masters Degree in
Data Science that the University of Wisconsin system is offering.

After introductions, Mamadou started us off by talking about the
lifecycle of  GIS data. Christian talked a bit about his first month
at Cisco, modernizing an old application.

Nick presented an introduction to the R language and R Studio,
designed for statistical analysis. He showed us a similar product from
Y Hat that used Python instead of R.

We talked about iPython Notebook, and its evolution in to Project
Jupyter which supports multiple programming languages. It is a
web-based interactive notebook viewer, where live code, text and
graphics exist on the same page. If you edit the code in a cell, that
cell's output changes too.

Aniko walked us through some of the R code he uses for cluster
analysis of plant species in his survey areas.

Nick showed off some of the capabilities of R Studio, presenting some
charts and map plots. He demonstrated a document in R Markdown, which
combines code and graphs in a way similar to iPython Notebook. We then
took a look at the web-hosted R service called Shiny. In that
platform, you specify server-side R code to process the data, and
client-side R code, which makes the UI interactive.

We moved in to a discussion of how R approaches location data
(statistically) versus how in GIS there is a lot of spatial processing
of location data. Nick concluded his presentation with a demo of the
leaflet.js javaScript mapping library, and showed how it was
integrated in to R and R Studio.


A great meeting, thanks to all who attended. Next month, the meeting
will be in Appleton, on Monday, September 14. It will be a crossover
event with the weekly Coder Cooperative meetings at the Appleton
Makerspace.

If you want more information about the weekly Coder Cooperative
events, join the North East Wisconsin Slack channel. There is an
active community of people on that channel, talking about technology
in the Fox Valley. Also, you can follow the Fox Valley Python User
Group, we're on Twitter @foxpython. Get in touch! We hope to see you
at a future meeting. We're in Appleton September 14, and we're back in
Oshkosh on October 5.