Lunch and Learn R Meet-ups

This page provides information related the Second season of “Lunch and Learn R” seminars organized by Dmitry Gorodnichy with his colleagues in Gov’t of Canada. In interactive hands-on way, they show how to learn and master R - one of the most popular tools used for data analysis and visualization - using open source resources.
The sessions are 45 mins long and run every Friday at lunch time via MS Teams, with the objective to develop something useful for community by the end of 8-10 sessions, e.g., a Web App or a package that can visualize some complex and important data, the plenty of which is available at open.canada.ca.
No programming experience or data science background required. No installation of software is needed either. If you don’t have RStudio installed on your machine, you can code in https://rstudio.cloud. It’s free, no subscription required, and is greatly supported by community.

• For whom: Open to all GC employees and collaborators
• When: Every Friday at Lunch time (12:00 - 12:50)
• How: Via MS Team. Dial-in instructions are posted on ** GCCollab **

Related resources:

• Codes that we write: GCcode ‘r4gc’ group pages
• Ideas for self-learning in Resources

• Data-sets and R projects about Ottawa and Canada

• Polls at GCcollab: https://gccollab.ca/polls/group/7391537/all
• Polls and Q&A at Sli.do: code “r4gc”
• Season 1 (Summer 2020): Building COVID Web App from scratch

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Season 2 (Spring 2021)

Main Topic: “Converting your useful and complex codes into packges for common use by everyone”

Sub-topics:

• How to use GCcode (GitLab for GC)
• Make data.table your closest friend!
• Why think OOP (Object Oriented Programming)
• R vs. Python, R and Python
• Text analysis, Topic extraction
• Foundations for robust, scalable, collaborative data programming

Summary:

This season of the “Lunch and Learn R” hands-on (“build from scratch”) tutorials is focused on developing skills for building your own R packages. The objective is to build a variety of useful packages for common use by all, using the codes contributed by the community. This includes the ones to read, analyze and visualize COVID-19 stats, ATIP requestes, PSES results, and other data-sets used by government organizations. We’ll use the R codes already contributed by the GC community and will learn how to convert these codes to packages that can be (re)used by other GC colleagues. In doing that, we’ll be learning not only about packages, but also about good data coding practices, i.e. how to code collabortively, using the best tools and methodologies developed by increasingly growing international community. We will also talk about data engineeing problems and the problem of “bias” in automated systems – and see what can be done to deal with those problems.

About the host:

Dmitry Gorodnichy came to Data Science from Computer Science , or Computing Science - the way it is called at University of Alberta, where he did his Ph.D. and was the course coordinator and instructor for Introduction to Computing Science (CMPUT-101). The term “Data Science” was introduced recently, whereas the term Computing Science — or “Informatics”, the way it is called in French, and Cybernetics, the way it is also called in Europe — existed for over half a century. This defines a critical difference in the way Dmitry approaches and teaches “Data Science”. - It is Computer Science driven. What does it mean? Join the meeting to find out! Dmitry is also a musician, so he will also entertain you with some live music!