Following the success of the first "Rencontres R" (Bordeaux, 2-3 July 2012, http://r2012.bordeaux.inria.fr/), the second meeting was held in Lyon on 27-28 June 2013. This French-speaking conference was a great success with 216 participants (110 were present at the first conference). The aim of the meeting was to provide a national forum for the exchange and sharing of ideas on the use of R in different disciplines. The number of participants and the list of sponsors (http://r2013-lyon.sciencesconf.org/resource/sponsors) demonstrate the increasing impact of R in both industry and academia in France. The program, detailed below, consisted of plenary sessions, oral presentations, lightning talks and poster sessions.

Invited speakers

Plenary sessions consisted of five talks (45 minutes) given by international experts:

  • Hadley Wickham: Visualising big data in R

  • Karim Chine: R and the cloud

  • Jérôme Sueur: R as a sound system

  • Yvonnick Noël: A model comparison approach with R2STATS for teaching statistics in the social sciences

  • Gilbert Ritschard: TraMineR: a toolbox for exploring and rendering sequence data

User-contributed sessions

Thirty-two users and developers presented original and attractive contributions covering nine fields:

  • graphics & visualization

  • high performance computing

  • applied statistics

  • data analysis & classification

  • packages specific to a field of application

  • teaching & pedagogy

  • mixed models & longitudinal data

  • dynamic documents & graphical interface

  • genomic data analysis

Additionally, fourteen lightning talks (6 minutes with an automatic slide advancement) allowed participants to quickly present their work on R. Eight posters were presented during the poster session and the contribution of Ewen Gallic (University Rennes 1) entitled Visualizing spatial processes using Ripley’s correction won the best poster prize (two R books).

Pre-conference tutorials

Two tutorial sessions were organized on Wednesday 26 June afternoon (around 30 participants per tutorial). The first session on Parallel computing with R was taught by Vincent Miele (University Lyon 1). During the second session, Anne-Béatrice Dufour (University Lyon 1) and Sylvain Mousset (University Lyon 1) showed How to write a report with Sweave and then Christophe Genolini (University Paris Ouest - Nanterre) introduced How to create an R package.

Conclusions

The organizing committee consisted of Julien Barnier (ENS Lyon), Stéphane Dray (Chairman, University Lyon 1), Kenneth Knoblauch (Inserm Lyon), Martyn Plummer (IARC) and Aurélie Siberchicot (University Lyon 1).

The program was designed by the scientific committee composed of Simon Barthelmé (University of Geneva), Marie-Laure Delignette-Muller (VetAgro Sup), Christophe Genolini, Robin Genuer (Chairman, University Bordeaux 2), Julie Josse (Agrocampus Rennes) and Jérôme Saracco (Bordeaux Institute of Technology).

The list of sponsors, participants, program, abstracts and slides are freely available on the conference web site at http://r2013-lyon.sciencesconf.org/. We would like to thank the members of the steering committee that initiated this conference: Marie Chavent (University Bordeaux 2), Robin Genuer, François Husson (Agrocampus Rennes), Julie Josse, Benoit Liquet (University Bordeaux 2) and Jérôme Saracco.

During the meeting, several discussions took place about the structuring of the French-speaking R-users community. After the conference, we launched an R-user group based at Lyon (see http://listes.univ-lyon1.fr/sympa/info/rlyon) and we will try to share some resources (common web site, etc.) with the existing semin-R group based at Paris (http://rug.mnhn.fr/semin-r). During the conference, it was also decided that the third edition of the "Rencontres R" will be organized in Montpellier in 2014.