Announcement

Signals commitment to open source to help improve data analysis and address growing demands of big data

SAN FRANCISCO (Spark Summit) June 6, 2016 – The R Consortium, an open source foundation to support the R user community and a Linux Foundation project, today is announcing IBM is becoming a Platinum member of the project, which demonstrates a significant investment in the open source R programming language to simplify data analysis and statistical computing.

By 2020, an estimated 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet (see: IDC study, Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services Forecast, 2015-2019). However, less than one percent of this data is ever analyzed for meaningful applications. Data scientists, for example, spend up to 70 percent of their time integrating and organizing data before analyzing and applying it toward critical applications like weather modeling or cancer research.

The R language is a free and open source programming language used by statisticians, analysts and scientists to unlock the value from data. It provides an interactive environment for data analysis, modeling and visualization. The R Consortium aims to support the growing R user community and help ensure that the language evolves to meet new data challenges as they arise.

As a global leader in data analytics and management, IBM has invested in software and technology solutions designed to help enterprises gain powerful insights from data. The company has relied on R, among other data languages, to help create innovative solutions like IBM Watson, an open, cognitive computing technology platform that represents a new era in computing where systems understand the world like humans do: through senses, learning, and experience.  As a member of the R Consortium, IBM will collaborate with the R user community and support the project’s mission to identify, develop and implement infrastructure projects that drive standards and best practices for R code.

“We’re pleased to welcome IBM to the R Consortium,” said Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chair, R Consortium. “IBM is a longstanding contributor to open source software and has immense expertise in data analytics and computing. I very much look forward to their collaboration with the R community.”

As a Platinum member of R Consortium, IBM will gain a seat on both the Board of Directors and Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC), helping to provide support and technical guidance to the R community. Dinesh Nirmal, vice president of development for next generation analytics platform and big data solutions, will join the R Consortium Board of Directors.

“IBM is deeply invested in open source software for computing applications like data science. And as a long time member of The Linux Foundation, it’s a natural fit for us to extend our commitment to collaborative development by joining the R Consortium,” said Dinesh Nirmal, IBM. “The R Consortium is the leading open source community to advance the R language for data analysis and modeling, and we are very eager to collaborate with the R user community.”

IBM joins Platinum members Microsoft and RStudio and is also a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation.

Today’s news furthers IBM’s commitment to advance Spark as the analytics operating system for accelerating innovation and driving analytics across every business. IBM continues to partner with leading data science organizations including Galvanize, H2O, LightBend and RStudio to promote an integrated and unified data science ecosystem. Additionally, IBM is joining the R Consortium to help accelerate data science’s readiness for the enterprise.

About The R Consortium

The R Consortium is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization and Linux Foundation Collaborative Project dedicated to the support and growth of the R user community. The R Consortium provides support to the R Foundation and to the greater R Community for projects that assist R package developers, provide documentation and training, facilitate the growth of the R Community and promote the use of the R language. For more information about R Consortium, please visit: http://www.r-consortium.org.

Media Contact

Kyle Donovan
The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.org

 R Consortium awards seven grant recipients and forms two working groups to advance R programming language

SAN FRANCISCO – March 23, 2016 – The R Consortium, an open source foundation to support the R user community and a Linux Foundation project, today is announcing funding for seven community projects and the formation of two technical working groups. These milestones advance the R Consortium’s mission to support the R community through the identification, development and implementation of infrastructure projects that drive standards and best practices for R code.

The R programming language provides an unparalleled interactive environment for data analysis, modeling, and visualization. R is a top-20 programming language (see: TIOBE Ranking Index), and its popularity is expected to grow with data demand. The R Consortium was founded to support the richness and diversity of the R community and to ensure that it continues to meet new data challenges as they arise.

“The R Consortium is proud to support initiatives that will positively impact many R users, including community events, training, packages for critical infrastructure and building consensus around important future challenges,” said Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chair, R Consortium. “We’re excited to announce our second round of ISC grants.”

Seven R-focused Projects Receive Grants

The R Consortium awarded the first grant in November 2015 to R-Hub, a service for developing, building, testing and validating R packages. Today the R Consortium is providing funding for seven additional initiatives to develop tools and resources for the R user community, bringing total grant funding to $200,000. Today’s grant recipients include:

• A Unified Framework for Distributed Computing in R: Many Big Data platforms expose R-based interfaces that lack standardization and are therefore difficult to learn. This project will develop a common framework to simplify and standardize how users program distributed applications in R, ultimately reducing duplication of effort.

          Michael Lawrence (R core, Genetech), Edward Ma (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), and  Indrajit Roy (Hewlett Packard Labs)

• Improving Database Interface (DBI): Database access is an important cornerstone of the R ecosystem, but today’s specifications – data type transformation, return values, error conditions – remain vague and result in data analysis errors. This project aims to improve database access in R so that porting code is simplified and less prone to error.

         Kirill Müller (ETH Zürich)

• R Implementation, Optimization and Tooling Workshops (RIOT): RIOT 2016 is a one-day workshop to unite R language developers, identify R language development and tooling opportunities, increase involvement of the R user community and more.

        Mark Hornick, Lukas Stadler and Adam Welc (Oracle)

• R Localization Proposal (RL10N): Although the R language is used globally, very few R packages are available in languages other than English. The RL10N project will make it easier for R developers to include translations in their own packages.

        Richie Cotton (Weill Cornell Medicine in Quatar) and Thomas Leeper (The London School of Economics and Political Science)

• Sat R Days: “SatRDays” are community-led, regional conferences to support collaboration, networking and innovation within the R community. Initially three events will be hosted, with plans for additional meet-ups as the R user base grows.

       Gergely Daroczi (Hungarian R user group) and Steph Locke (Mango Solutions)

• Simple Features Access for R: Using the “Simple Features” standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium and the International Organization for Standardization, this tool will simplify analysis on modern geospatial data.

     Edzer Pebesma (Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster)

• Software Carpentry R Instructor Training: This two-day in-person training course will introduce the basics of R programming and address the growing demand for training resources for the R language.

     John Blishak, Jonah Duckles, Laurent Gatto, David LeBauer, and Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry)

The R Consortium ISC awards grants based on the critical nature of the problem(s) being addressed; the solvability of work involved; the amount of financial aid needed; and level of community support. A community-wide call for proposals is now open until July 10, 2016. To submit a proposal or learn more information, please visit https://www.r-consortium.org/about/isc/proposals or email proposals@r-consortium.org.

Working Groups Enable Collaboration

The R Consortium is also forming its first two working groups to facilitate collaboration and focus the community’s efforts toward two critical areas needed to advance the R programming language: standardization and best practices.

• Future-proof native APIs for R: This working groups will assess current native API usage, gather community input, and work towards an easy-to-understand, consistent and verifiable API that will drive R language adoption.
• Code Coverage Tool for R: Helping to improve software quality, the code coverage tool will address feature and platform limitations of existing tools while also promoting the use of code coverage more systematically within the R ecosystem.

R Consortium is an independently supported software project hosted by The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation’s projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology. For more information, please visit:http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org.

About The R Consortium

The R Consortium is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization and Linux Foundation Collaborative Project dedicated to the support and growth of the R user community. The R Consortium provides support to the R Foundation and to the greater R Community for projects that assist R package developers, provide documentation and training, facilitate the growth of the R Community and promote the use of the R language. For more information about R Consortium, please visit: http://www.r-consortium.org.

Media Contacts
The Linux Foundation
PR@linuxfoundation.org

SAN FRANCISCO and BOSTON (EARL Conference), November 2, 2015 – The R Consortium, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and open source foundation to support the R user community, today announced it is awarding its first grant to advance the infrastructure supporting the R programming language. Led by the R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC), the grant program provides financial support to projects that will address critical needs of the R user community.

The R Consortium ISC is organized to provide technical oversight and recommendations for grants for projects that help the R user community. The ISC grant program is designed to broadly support the R community including software development; developing new, teaching materials; documenting best practices; promoting R to new audiences; and standardizing APIs or doing research.

The R Consortium’s first grant is awarded to Gábor Csárdi, Ph.D., to implement R-Hub, a new service for developing, building, testing and validating R packages. R-Hub will be complementary to both CRAN, the major repository for open source R packages, and R-Forge, the platform supporting R package developers. R-Hub will provide build services, continuous integration for R packages and a distribution mechanism for R package sources and binaries.

Goals for R-Hub include:

●      simplify the R package development process: creating a package, building binaries and continuous integration, publishing, distributing and maintaining it;

●      provide services free for all members of the community;

●      encourage community contributions; and

●      pre-test CRAN package submissions to ease burden on CRAN maintainers.

 “R-Hub will modernize and improve the entire process of developing and testing R packages,” said Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chair, R Consortium. “We are dedicating a large portion of R Consortium resources to help fund projects that will help sustain the technical growth of the R community. We very much look forward to it.”
The ISC awards grants based on the critical nature of the problem(s) being addressed; the solvability of work involved; the amount of financial aid needed; and level of community support. Including today’s grant, the ISC plans to award nearly $200,000 in grants over the next several months. A community-wide call for proposals is now open until January 10, 2016. To submit a proposal or learn more information, please visit https://www.r-consortium.org/about/isc/proposals or email proposals@r-consortium.org.
The open source R programming language is used by statisticians, analysts and data scientists for statistical computing. It provides an interactive environment for data analysis, modeling and visualization. The R Consortium complements the work of the R Foundation, a non profit organization that develops and maintains the R language. The R Consortium focuses on user outreach and other projects designed to assist the R user and developer communities.

An R Consortium Forum panel discussion at the annual EARL Conference will be held with several members of the R Consortium Board, include JJ Allaire (RStudio), Lou Bajuk-Yorgan (TIBCO Software), Richard Pugh (Mango Solutions) and David Smith (Microsoft) on November 3 at 5 pm ET. For the full conference agenda, visit:http://www.earl-conference.com/boston/agenda/.

R Consortium is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Collaborative Projects are independently supported software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. By spreading the collaborative DNA of the largest collaborative software development project in history, The Linux Foundation provides the essential collaborative and organizational framework so project hosts can focus on innovation and results. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology. For more information about Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, please visit: http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/

About The R Consortium

The R Consortium is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization and Linux Foundation Collaborative Project dedicated to the support and growth of the R user community. The R Consortium provides support to the R Foundation and to the greater R Community for projects that assist R package developers, provide documentation and training, facilitate the growth of the R Community and promote the use of the R language. For more information about R Consortium, please visit: http://www.r-consortium.org.

Media Contact

Whitney True
The Linux Foundation
wtrue@linuxfoundation.org
1.504.427.1242

Data scientists from industry and academic research will work together to advance world’s most popular language for analytics and data science and support the rapid growth of the R user community

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 30, 2015 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the R Consortium. This new organization will strengthen both the technical and user communities as a Collaborative Project hosted at Linux Foundation.

The R language is used by statisticians, analysts and data scientists to unlock value from data. It is a free and open source programming language for statistical computing and provides an interactive environment for data analysis, modeling and visualization. The R Consortium will complement the work of the R Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Austria that maintains the language. The R Consortium will focus on user outreach and other projects designed to assist the R user and developer communities.

Founding companies and organizations of the R Consortium include The R Foundation, Platinum members Microsoft and RStudio; Gold member TIBCO Software Inc.; and Silver members Alteryx, Google, HP, Mango Solutions, Ketchum Trading and Oracle.

“Millions of data scientists and academic researchers use R language every day and want to collaborate with their peers to share visualization and analysis techniques,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The R Consortium will promote the sharing of ideas and accelerate findings that make R even better for business, research and academic purposes.”

The R user community is vibrant with local user groups organized all over the world. The R Consortium will work with this user community and the R Foundation to amplify and focus the impact of this global community in order to advance the project for all users and developers, including millions more in the coming years.

“This is a great opportunity to harness the power of the thriving R user community around the globe and advance the R language for everyone,” said John Chambers on behalf of the R Foundation Board. “The R Consortium will provide vital funding support for R services and development, made possible by the Linux Foundation’s proven track record of bringing large-scale communities together. We are looking forward to working with both organizations.”

The open governance model for R Consortium includes an infrastructure steering committee that will direct technical decisions and oversee working group projects and a board of directors to guide business decisions.

R Consortium is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and complements other data-oriented collaboration activities hosted by the organization. For example, the recently announced Apache: Big Data conference gathers the leading infrastructure projects that make up a Big Data computing environment.

R Consortium is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Collaborative Projects are independently supported software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. By spreading the collaborative DNA of the largest collaborative software development project in history, The Linux Foundation provides the essential collaborative and organizational framework so project hosts can focus on innovation and results. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology. For more information about Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, please visit: http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/

For more information about R Consortium, please visit: http://www.r-consortium.org.

Comments from Members

Alteryx
“Alteryx is excited to be a founding member of the R Consortium as it will provide a forum to support the R user community and extend collaboration across the developer community,” said Dan Putler, Chief Scientist, Alteryx. “The consortium will further our goal of providing access to R-based advanced analytics to the broadest range and type of users.”

Google
“We’ve got over a thousand Googlers using R, and it is critical to many projects,” said Tim Hesterberg, Senior Quantitative Analyst, Google. “We love that it is open source, so we can connect to our internal data processing tools. We’re happy to support the R infrastructure as part of the R Consortium.”

Ketchum Trading
“R is a critical component of our quantitative financial modeling environment, and Ketchum Trading is thrilled to be a founding member of the R Consortium and assist the world-wide user base by contributing to industrial-strength collaboration and support to the R community,” said Petri Fast, COO, Ketchum Trading.

Mango Solutions
“Mango Solutions has been helping customers to leverage R in a commercial environment for over a decade. The R Consortium represents a vital step change, enabling more enterprises to adopt this excellent technology, and Mango Solutions is proud and excited to be involved in this exciting new chapter as a founder member,” said Matt Aldridge, CEO, Mango Solutions.

Microsoft
“The R Consortium will support the R community by helping companies that rely on R — and their data scientists and developers — to work together to answer some of today’s most complex technology and research questions,” said David Smith, R Community Lead, Microsoft. “We’re excited to galvanize this initiative as a founding member.”

RStudio
“Millions of people use R every day. It is the natural time to provide this global community with dedicated support to amplify their work and drive collaborative opportunities with the developer community,” said J.J. Allaire, RStudio’s CEO and Founder. “We’re excited to be at the forefront of this important work.”

Oracle
“Data science is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in business, science, and technology, where the R language and ecosystem is a major enabling force,” said Neil Mendelson, Vice President, Big Data and Advanced Analytics, Oracle  “The R Consortium is an important enabling body to support and help grow the R user community, which increasingly includes enterprise data scientists.”

TIBCO Software Inc
“Data scientists use R to drive business decisions. The community needs the infrastructure in place to accelerate this critical work, and the R Consortium does exactly that,” said Brian Gentile, Senior Vice President and General Manager of TIBCO Analytics, TIBCO Software, Inc. “We’re looking forward to this collaboration and are excited to be among the founding members.”

About the R Consortium

The R Consortium is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization and Linux Foundation Collaborative Project dedicated to the support and growth of the R user community. The R Consortium works with and provides support to the R Foundation and other organizations developing, maintaining and distributing R software and provides a unifying framework for the R user community.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
The Linux Foundation
503-867-2304
Jennifer@Linuxfoundation.org