Hi everyone,

Our final meeting for 2018 will be held on Wednesday 21st of November, from 5.30pm. The venue is David Hume Tower, room LG.09 (see map below). As usual, the meeting will be open for all to attend, and newcomers / beginners are very welcome!

Our first guest speaker this month will be Dr Michael Spencer, data scientist and hydrologist at Scotland’s Rural College. He will be talking about GIS and R, and proposing some answers to the following question:

Data Science and GIS

(handout here, slides to follow)

There’s a lot of buzz around spatial data science. The sf package has made some great progress in undertaking traditional GIS tasks within R. But where are the limits of R in spatial work and what role does traditional desktop GIS software have to play in our workflow?

Our second speaker will be Dr Christophe Ladroue, senior statistical software programmer at Quantics, UK. He will be discussing:

Debugging with RStudio

(see code example here)

Using print statements is useful for tracking down a bug, but as soon as your program gets complex, this approach quickly becomes unwieldy. A debugger allows you to peek into your functions as they are used and helps you locate errors in your code more efficiently. I’ll go through a programming scenario to demonstrate the usefulness of the R debugger, including some options present in RStudio.

Here is a map of where we’ll be for the meeting, followed by a trip to the nearby St. Andrews Brewing Co. pub:

See you there!

Caterina Constantinescu