CascadiaRConf 2021: Infectious Ideas

June 4-5, 2021

Virtual conference

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KEYNOTES

We are proud to annouce our 2021 Keynote speakers.

Stephanie Hazlitt

Observations from the field: regime shifts in R and data science within the BC Public Service

The BC Public Service has seen a significant shift towards the use of R and other data science tools for data analysis and communication. In the natural world, these regime shifts—large, persistent changes to a system—usually require some perturbation (either internal or external) or disturbance event to initiate the shift. This talk will share insider observations of some of the events, processes, and even a disturbance, that have helped kickstart and support the use and growth of R and develop a data science community. Together these changes, with some ongoing organizational support, have enabled some individual contributors, data science teams and leadership in the BC Public Service to shift towards more programmatic, open and reproducible data science workflows

Stephanie Hazlitt is a Senior Data Scientist with the British Columbia Provincial Government. She uses R in her everyday work supporting data-driven decision making, and supports people and teams in learning, creating and sharing data science tools and products. She is helping to enhance data science capacity in the British Columbia Public Service by coordinating and team teaching workshops, supporting a growing community of practice and collaborating on R packages that support data science workflows.

Allison Horst and Julia Stewart Lowndes

Open science as a movement and the art of Openscapes

The open science movement is “a collaborative culture enabled by technology that empowers the open sharing of data, information and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public to accelerate scientific research and understanding” (Ramachandran et al 2021). We’ve felt included in this movement through the #rstats community, and argue that open data science is a powerful entryway to welcome researchers to open science – one that transforms open science from an aspirational idea to a tangible daily benefit for efficiency, reproducibility, and collaboration. We will share how Openscapes is helping to onboard more research teams to the open science movement, in part through artwork to represent and develop ideas to make open science more inclusive and kind.

Julia Stewart Lowndes is a marine data scientist and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). As founding director of Openscapes (created during her Mozilla Fellowship) she champions kinder, better science in less time and empowers science teams with skillsets and mindsets for open, reproducible research. She earned her PhD at Stanford University in 2012 studying drivers and impacts of Humboldt squid in a changing climate. She is a Carpentries instructor and co-founder of Eco-Data-Science and R-Ladies Santa Barbara.

Allison Horst is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara, where she has been teaching environmental data science, math and data analysis courses since 2012. Through her artwork, Allison illustrates data science concepts, R packages and functions, workflows and mindsets to welcome and support R learners, and was RStudio's Artist-in-Residence from 2019 - 2020. She co-founded and is an active member of the UCSB TidyTuesday coding club and R-Ladies Santa Barbara.

2021 Sponsors