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Recap of the uRos2017 conference

By December 20, 2017April 21st, 2022Blog, Events

Editor’s Note: This post comes from Nicoleta Caragea, uRos2017 conference organizer. uRos2017 is a conference held in November 2017  for collaboration around the use of R in Romania.  Through the RUGS program, R Consortium was honored to be a sponsor for this event. If you have an smaller event you would like support for, stay tuned for the official program announcement in early 2018.

uRos2017 conference

The International Conference New Challenges for Statistical Software – The Use of R in Official Statistics – uRos2017, the fifth in a series of events, organized at Romanian NIS dedicated to the use of R Project in Romania, was held between 6-7 of November 2017. The conference, which provides a public forum for researchers from academia and institutes of statistics, brought together over 60 participants from 20 countries (Austria, Canada, Columbia, Croatia, France, Deutschland, Italy, Irak, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey). Moreover, representatives from Eurostat and other international organizations (United Nations/UNIDO and FAO) attended as guests.

Not only was uRos2017 an opportunity to develop new ideas and cooperation in the field of official statistics, the event once again demonstrated the significant role played by National Institute of Statistics in the official statistics and gives Romania a prominent spot on the map of useRs.

uRos2017 growth

Throughout the five editions of the event, the international participation has increased exponentially.

The event hosted, besides the presentations, eight workshops lectured by prestigious professionals from official statistics and academia:

  • Mark van der Loo (Statistics Netherlands), Statistical data cleaning with R
  • Valentin Todorov (United Nations Industrial Development Organization), R in the statistical office: the UNIDO experience
  • Bernhard Meindl (Statistics Austria), Current developments in R-packages sdcMicro and sdcTable for statistical disclosure control
  • Marcello D’Orazio (Food and Agriculture Organization of The United Nations), Outlier detection in R: some remarks
  • Camelia Goga (Institut de Mathématiques de Bourgogne, Université de Bourgogne, France), Survey sampling techniques with R
  • Hervé Cardot (Institut de Mathématiques de Bourgogne, Université de Bourgogne, France), Fast robust center estimation, clustering and Principal Components Analysis with large samples in high dimension with R
  • Bogdan Oancea (National Institute of Statistics/University of Bucharest, Romania) and Ciprian Alexandru (National Institute of Statistics/Ecological University of Bucharest, Romania), From unstructured data to structured data – Web scraping for Official Statistics
  • Elena Druică (University of Bucharest, Department of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Romania), Working with the ‘pglm’ package in R. Explaining the number of nosocomial infections in Romanian hospitals

uRos2017 speakers 1 uRos2017 speakers 2

The proceedings of the conference, which took place in parallel sections and included 22 presentations and 8 thematic workshops, will be published in two issues of Romanian Statistical Review: no. 4/2017 and no. 1/2018. The first one has already been published and handed to the participants during the conference, and the second one will be released in March 2018.

Romanian Statistical Review 4/2017A novelty of this year’s edition is that the conference joined with “International Conference On Computing, Mathematics And Statistics 2017” (iCMS2017), held in Langkawi Island, Malaysia. Nicolaas Jan Dirk Nagelkerke, Matthias Templ and Martin Everett delivered keynote talks at uRos2017 Asia Pacific/iCMS2017.

As a satellite event of uRos2017, a meeting between Japan’s, Austria’s (UN/UNIDO) and Romanian NIS representatives took place on November 8. The meeting was an opportunity to exchange ideas and knowledge. The discussions regarded the following subjects:

  • Modernization of Romanian Official Statistics
  • The use of R in statistical surveys
  • Data editing (outlier detection, imputation etc.)
  • Generation of statistical reports using R with Sweave/knitr
  • Online data collection for business statistics surveys

You can find more information about uRos2017 at the conference website.

The R-omanian team, has agreed to organize uRos2018 together with our colleagues from CBS-Netherlands. Keep in contact on: https://twitter.com/uRos2018.