We will be hosting a special guest today ( 4PM GMT) at the Boulder BI Brain Trust! Revolution Analytics, the popular R evangelist David Smith and Michele Chambers, Chief Strategy Officer.

As you may know, Boulder BI Brain Trust is founded and led by the internationally recognized BI authority Dr. Claudia Imhoff.  BBBT’s aims at benefiting the Business Intelligence and big data industry by providing pro bono exchange of information between vendors and member analysts/consultants on new trends and technologies and also by providing vendors with constructive feedback on their offerings, marketing messages, roadmaps, etc.

Background about Revolution Analytics:

Revolution Analytics (formerly Revolution Computing) was founded in 2007 to foster the R Community, as well as support the growing needs of commercial users. Their name derives from combining the letter “R” with the word “evolution.” It speaks to the ongoing development of the R language from an open-source academic research tool into commercial applications for industrial use.

You can find here some interesting videos about Revolution Analytics:

• About Revolution Analytics (90 s): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_hjbYCx4Y
• About Revolution R Enterprise and Hadoop (4 mins): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-P6xh8rwVg

The session is also special this year as we celebrate the International Year of Statistics and R is becoming a mainstream statistical programming language along with its other powerful data science capabilities.

R is now one of the most important tools in data science or this big data era.  Techcrunch listed R as one of the five trendy open source big data technologies: http://tcrn.ch/YGLlIN

Also, I have seen a lot of interesting stories told with R these 2 years. For example, I played with this visualization during hurricane sandy. It tracked the storm using R: …Also:

• Votamatic predicted the Presidential Election results with R: .
• The political revolutions on Twitter were visualized with R:.  
• What about playing with tourism data using R with googleVis package? .
• And who said that R visualizations are not sexy? You can style your charts like the Economist,  and Tableau:.

R is not only a statistical programming language. I have used several interesting packages like SNA for social network analysis,  twitteR package for twitter analytics, and other machine learning packages.

One of the drawbacks of the open source R is that its Objects must generally be stored in physical memory and it is RAM intensive. For example, you’ll need 1.34 GB of RAM to store an R data frame of 1,500,000 row and 120 columns. However, Revolution Analytics is better with big data analytics. It makes R more powerful when processing big data sets by its Hadoop integration and high-speed parallel processing. You can check this comparison table for the features added to open source R by Revolution Analytics Enterprise : . 

If you want to learn R, there are a lot of free online resources. I recommend:

• Free ebook: Data Science with R, by Syracuse University: 
• Codeschool free onlince course: 
• Videos from Coursera’s four week course in R: http://bit.ly/ZwjFFH

Follow the BBBT on Twitter:

The event will be an exclusive analyst session specifically for BBBT members, however, we tweet big time during the session so you can gain insights by:

• Following the Tweet stream via #BBBT.
• Listening to the podcast between Claudia Imhoff and Revolution Analytics which is posted in few days after the session at: BBBT podcasts.

Catch you on Twitter!
Thanks,

Ali Rebaie.