How to Hack Your Annual Review

http://www.jonathoncolman.org/2014/01/06/how-to-hack-your-annual-self-review/

Understanding IA

REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS ENSURING LEADERSHIP IN FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Can someone please read this and give me a summary? :)

Guess that's my job, though. #sigh

The Report

White House Blog Post

Data Analysis with Pipes

NIH Frontiers in Data Science Series

Lecture Title: Data Analysis with Pipes

Please join us for a lecture by Hadley Wickham, Chief Scientist at RStudio and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Rice University. He is the author of several of the most revolutionary, influential, and popular software packages for the R statistical software environment including dplyr, ggplot2, reshape2, and numerous others. This lecture is sponsored by the NIH Office of the Associate Director for Data Science in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute.

Hadley Wickham
Chief Scientist at RStudio
and Adjunct Assistant Professor
Rice University

When: Wednesday, September 16, 2015, 2:30-3:30 pm
Where: Building 40, room 1201/1203

Abstract: Over the last year and half, three things have had a profound impact on how I develop tools for data analysis: Rcpp, writing the advanced R book (http://adv-r.had.co.nz/) and the pipe operator (%>%, from magrittr). In this talk, I'll focus on the pipe operator and how it’s influenced the development of tidyr, dplyr and ggvis, the next generation of reshape2, plyr and ggplot2. Come along to learn about why I think pipelines are awesome and see how pipelines + tidyr, dplyr, and ggvis can make your data analysis fast, fluent and fun.

Links of interest:
http://had.co.nz/
http://priceonomics.com/hadley-wickham-the-man-who-revolutionized-r/
http://www.r-bloggers.com/a-conversation-with-hadley-wickham-the-user-2014-interview/

Feel free to contact Sean Davis (sdavis2@mail.nih.gov) or Michelle Dunn (dunnm3@od.nih.gov) with questions.

Recent Developments in Artificial Intelligence - Lessons from the Private Sector

NIH Frontiers in Data Science Series

Lecture Title: Recent Developments in Artificial Intelligence - Lessons from the Private Sector

Andrew Moore
Dean of the School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

When: Monday, September 21, 2015, 12:00-1:00 pm
Where: Building 10, Lipsett Auditorium

The lecture will be archived and videocasted at: https://videocast.nih.gov
Please join us for a lecture sponsored by the NIH Office of the Associate Director for Data Science in conjunction with the National Library of Medicine. Dr. Andrew Moore will discuss some of the big developments in computer science from the perspective of someone crossing over from industry to academia. He will talk about roadmaps for AI-based consumer and advice products in the commercial world and contrast with some of the potentially viable roadmaps in healthcare. Dr. Moore will also touch on entity stores (aka knowledge graphs), question answering and ultra-large data center architectures. Please visit the event page at https://datascience.nih.gov/community/datascience-at-nih/frontiers for more information.

Andrew Moore is the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His areas of research and expertise include decision and control algorithms, statistical machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, and statistical computation for large volumes of data. Dr. Moore previously served as the VP of Engineering at Google Pittsburg where he was responsible for the retail segment: Google Shopping. He was involved with a number of Google/University activities, two examples of which were Google Sky (in collaboration with CMU, Hubble Space Telescope Center and University of Washington) and the Android SkyMap app.

Reasonable Accommodation: Individuals with disabilities who need Sign Language Interpreters and/or reasonable accommodation to participate in this event should contact Sonynka Ngosso, at 301-402-9816 and/or the Federal Relay(1-800-877-8339). Requests should be made at least 5 business days in advance of the event.

Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute

I'm hoping to  help build collaborations with the librarians from IU for a joint Purdue-IU meeting. We're getting together this week at the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute Conference, where I'll hear about what's going on in the world of translational research and meet a few new people.

See the agenda here!.

My -- Obsession

I'm expected to write a lot now--briefs, memos, reports, reviews, articles, etc. I know I have lots of room for improvement so I've joined a faculty writing group.

The writing group is interdisciplinary, and broken into groups of four. On my team are an Anthropologist, an African American Studies person, and someone from the English department. We had our first session, were asked to write a two page report on a topic, and critiqued each others' work. I learned that I use '--' way too much, especially in place of commas. The universal comment: 

"Do not use dashes to set apart material when commas would do the work for you."

Ok, fine. I just love dashes so much--apparently a little too much.

"The dash is a handy device, informal and esentially playful, telling you that you're about to take off on a different tack but still in some way connected with the present course--only you have to remember that the dash is there, and either put a second dash at the end of the notion to let the reader know that he's back on course, or else end the sentence, as here, with a period." 

--Lewis Thomas