useR! 2008 in Dortmund 

 Abstracts are now being accepted for the 2008 useR! conference in Dortmund, Germany.  This conference is designed to bring R users and developers together to trade ideas and find out what is new in the sprawling world of R.  Several of us went to the Vienna conference a few years ago, and found it very useful.  Previous editions have had a good mix of academic and private sector participants, and I learned more than I have at some of the more traditional academic conferences.  The announcement from the useR webpage is below; the website is at  http://www.statistik.uni-dortmund.de/useR-2008/  


 useR! 2008, the R user conference, takes place at the Fakultät Statistik, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany from 2008-08-12 to 2008-08-14. Pre-conference tutorials will take place on August 11.

 The conference is organized by the Fakultät Statistik, Technische Universität Dortmund and the Austrian Association for Statistical Computing (AASC). It is funded by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing.  

 Following the successful useR! 2004, useR! 2006, and useR! 2007 conferences, the conference is focused on  

 
 R as the `lingua franca' of data analysis and statistical computing, 
 providing a platform for R users to discuss and exchange ideas how R can be used to do statistical computations, data analysis, visualization and exciting applications in various fields, 
 giving an overview of the new features of the rapidly evolving R project. 
 

 As for the predecessor conference, the program consists of two parts:  

 
 invited lectures discussing new R developments and exciting applications of R, 
 user-contributed presentations reflecting the wide range of fields in which R is used to analyze data.
  

 A major goal of the useR! conference is to bring users from various fields together and provide a platform for discussion and exchange of ideas: both in the formal framework of presentations as well as in the informal part of the conference in Dortmund's famous beer pubs and restaurants. 

 Prior to the conference, on 2008-08-11, there are tutorials offered at the conference site. Each tutorial has a length of 3 hours and takes place either in the morning or afternoon. 

 Call for Papers 
We invite all R users to submit abstracts presenting innovations or exciting applications of R on topics such as:  

 Applied Statistics & Biostatistics  
Bayesian Statistics  
Bioinformatics  
Chemometrics and Computational Physics  
Data Mining  
Econometrics & Finance  
Environmetrics & Ecological Modeling  
High Performance Computing  
Machine Learning  
Marketing & Business Analytics  
Psychometrics  
Robust Statistics  
Sensometrics  
Spatial Statistics  
Statistics in the Social and Political Sciences  
Teaching  
Visualization & Graphics  
and many more.  

 We recommend a length of about one page in pdf format. The program committee decided on the presentation format. There is no proceedings volume, but the abstracts are available in an online collection linked from the conference program and in a single pdf file. 

 Deadline for submission of abstracts: 2008-03-31.