A quick heads-up that I'll be presenting a live webinar on Thursday January 28, Introduction to Microsoft R Open. If you know anyone that should get to know R and/or Microsoft R Open, send 'em along. Here's the abstract:

Data Science is a strategic initiative for most companies today, who seek to understand the wealth of data now available to them to understand patterns, make forcecasts, and build data-driven products and process. The open-source R language is the lingua franca of data science, and ranked #6 in popularity amongst all languages by the IEEE. If you haven’t yet learned what R is all about, this webinar will bring you up to speed on the history of the R language, how it’s used, and why it’s so popular for developing advanced analytics applications.

In this 50-minute webinar, David Smith, R Community Lead at Microsoft, will introduce the R language and community, and give examples of R in action. In the webinar, David will demonstrate Microsoft R Open, Microsoft’s enhanced distribution of open-source R. He will also cover the enhancements included in Microsoft R Open, including enhanced performance, features for reproducible programming in R, and the new CRAN Time Machine for reproducible data analysis with R packages.

Then on February 4 Derek Norten (a frequent blogger here) will take a look at Using Microsoft R Server to Address Scalability Issues in R:

R is the world’s most widely-used programming language for data analysis. Despite its popularity, there are several constraints with leveraging open source R with enterprise-class datasets. In this 50-minute webinar, Derek Norton, Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft, will introduce the issues posed by open source R, and will walk through a use case that demonstrates how Microsoft R Server addresses each of the gaps associated with analyzing enterprise-class datasets with R.

Click the links above to register, or check out the full schedule of webinars at the link below — more will be added soon!

Microsoft: Microsoft R Webinars