This talk will provide a quick but intense introduction to the R Language: a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is open-source (mostly GPL-2), available for several platforms, and thrives in Linux. The talk will be largely example-driven, with plenty of takeaway material and code examples. I'll argue that it's simply the right language for data exploration and statistical analysis, and is particularly fantastic for graphics and code development. I'll conclude by introducing the package management system (and the Comprehensive R Archive Network -- CRAN) and the C/C++ interface.

More Information:

• R Project

About Jay Emerson:
Jay Emerson is Associate Professor of Statistics, Yale University. Jay teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses and often includes timely real-world problems and examples in his lectures, an intersection of teaching and research. For example, he collaborated with the Wall Street Journal in uncovering the infamous stock option backdating scandal, and he demonstrated a design flaw in the new scoring system used for international figure skating competitions. He has worked on Bayesian change point analyses and created the "generalized pairs plot" for the R Statistical Programming Environment. He has worked towards a scalable solution for statistical computing with massive data, extending support for the management, analysis, and exploration of massive data sets in R.