Originally appeared on: https://hutsons-hacks.info/nhs-r-2020-annual-conference and https://www.r-bloggers.com/2020/11/nhs-r-2020-week-long-conference/.
The NHS-R conference concluded, and I am emotional that it has ended. There were some fantastic speakers and the whole event, from start to finish was a blast.
Openers
I would like to include everyone on here, but the openers that had an impact for me are included below:
Conference opening – the journey so far – Professor Mohammed Amin Mohammed
What a great opener from Mohammed and it was really interesting to get a view of the direction of the NHS-R Community.
OpenSAFELY.org: proving the power of open methods for NHS data analysis
Ben Goldacre, you may have heard of his from his books on Bad Science and Bad Pharma, dropped in for a chat about the OpenSAFELY.org platform and the need for open methods for NHS data analysis.
Opening up Analytics by NHS-x
Sarah Culkin did a good talk on opening up new data analytics and the need for an open source mindset. Advanced analytics, was mentioned as another revolution and interesting work is at foot in the AI lab. Watch the video to find out more:
Excellent workshops
Prior to the conference, there were a week of excellent workshops. The ones I found most interesting were:
Regression Modelling
Chris Mainey did an excellent introduction to Regression Modelling. Check it out:
Pretty R Markdown and Presentations with Xaringan
This was a two part session by Silvia Canelón:
Introduction to and RMarkdown
Zoë Turner did a brilliant job of onboarding newer developers with {dplyr}:
Awesome plenary talks
The plenary talks were awesome this year, as well as the Lightening talks. I have not watched all of the sessions, so I do apologise if I missed you out, but all the sessions can be found on YouTube.
Computer Vision – how it can aid clinicians
Shameless self promotion – I did a talk on how Computer Vision can aid clinicians:
Building Predictive Models with HES data
Chris Mainey did another excellent slot looking at GAMS and Mixed Effects models, and how they apply to HES datasets:
Integrating R and QlikSense
Jamie-Leigh Chapman did a stellar job at showing the integration capabilities of R and QlikSense:
Decision Modelling in R and Shiny
A very interesting session by Robert Smith:
Causal Inference in Predictive Modelling
Great session from Andi Orlowski and Bruno Petrungaro:
Using polygon and spatial data to plot brain atlases
Athanasia Mowinckel has created an amazing package for displaying brain atlases:
R Code Quality: Does it Really Matter?
A great session on code quality and packages that can be used to scare the life of people with bad coding practice, sounds like all of my mates, and me:
APIs in R with Plumber
This session focussed on passing model parameters through from PlumbeR. Definitely something that will be very useful in the future:
Wowsome Lightening Talks
The Lightning talks this year, like everything else, were fascinating. The links to the three days worth of lightning talks are included in this post:
The full playlist
The below YouTube link has all the sessions from the workshop. The ones contained in my blog were the ones I got chance to watch and I found these really useful and interesting. I am sure there are many more in the playlist that I have not had time to watch yet. So much great content, so little time.
These can be accessed hereunder:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXCrMzQaI6c3EAh10hDZectzBALWPk19w
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXCrMzQaI6c0Kvs7lE-Rxdig5nc5-4Xx2
Subscribe to this YouTube channel and watch out for the excellent content coming out of this community. The belief is for 100% open source in the NHS and all our code is sharable.
See you for the conference in 2021
The blog has been edited for NHS-R Style