This is a chance for you to show off what you know about some of the more advanced and specialized features of R. Although these topics may not be immediately accessible to everyone, they will help you understand some of the potential that R can provide.


Everyone, beginner or advanced, is welcome. Don't be scared by the "advanced topics". It's your chance to see some of the capabilities that make R so useful, and even if you won't necessarily be able to use these features right away, you will still learn about future directions that you can take as you become more proficient in R programming.


We need a couple of volunteers. Steve Simon will talk about survival analysis. We've had a few suggestions for advanced topics: text mining and data visualization. One of our members mentioned at an earlier meeting that he might talk about tweet mining, but I have not had time to follow up with him about this.


We had a suggestion that, if possible, the speakers could post their materials (especially their data sources) a week or so before the meeting so that anyone attending could take a peek and maybe even try a few simple things themselves. This is not always possible, of course, but when it can be done, it is an excellent suggestion.