EARL is Europe’s largest R community event dedicated to showcasing commercial applications of the R language. As a conference, it has always lived up to its promise of connecting and inspiring R users with creative suggestions and solutions, sparking new ideas, solving problems and sharing perspectives to advance the community. 

2022 marks the return of face-to-face EARL (6th – 8th September at the Tower Hotel in London) - now run by Ascent, the new home of Mango Solutions. Over the past eight years, EARL has attracted some fascinating presentations from some engaging, authentic speakers, both experienced and first timers. This year, we’re keen to understand how recent global events and trends that have disrupted our view of ‘normal’ have impacted, changed or driven your R projects: from inspirational innovation to reducing operational cost and creating richer customer experiences.

If you have an interesting application of R, our call for abstracts is now open and we’re inviting you to share your synopsis with us. Deadline for submissions is Thursday 30th June. 

Maybe you’ve built a Shiny app that helps detect bias, or you’ve been on a data journey you’d like to share. Perhaps you’ve built a data science syllabus for young minds or created an NLP tool to automate clinical processes. If you are searching for inspiration, potential applications of R might come under the following categories:

• Responding to global events with R

• The role of R in the business data science toolbox

• Overcoming the challenges of using R commercially

• Efficient R: dealing with huge data

• Sustainable R / R for good

• R tools & packages (eg. Shiny R, Purrr)

• Building your R community

• Women in R

• The future of R in enterprise: 2022 and beyond

We are also looking for short form submissions: 10-minute lightning talks on a wide range of applications.

What’s presenting at EARL really like?  

We asked our 2019 presenters what prompted their decision to speak at our last in-person EARL and their advice to others who may be considering submitting an abstract for EARL 2022.

For Mitchell Stirling, Capacity and Modelling Manager at Heathrow Airport, the opportunity to present helped fulfil a professional ambition.

“I discussed with my line manager, slightly tongue in cheek, that it should be an ambition in 2019 when he signed off a conference attendance in Scotland the previous year. As the work I’d been doing developed in 2019 and the opportunity presented itself, I started to think “why not?” - this is interesting and if I can show it interestingly, hopefully others would agree. I was slightly wary of the technical nature of the event, with my exposure to coding in R still better measured in minutes than hours (never mind days) but a reassurance that people would be interested in the ‘what’ and ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’, won me over.” 

Dr Zhanna Mileeva, a Data Scientist at NBrown Group confirmed that making a contribution to the data science community was an important factor in her decision to submit an abstract:

“After some research I found the EARL conference as a great cross-sector forum for R users to share Data Science, AI and ML engineering knowledge, discuss modern business problems and pathways to solutions. It was a fantastic opportunity to contribute to this community, learn from it and re-charge with some fresh ideas.”

In past years EARL has attracted speakers from across the globe and last year, Harold Selman, Lead Data Scientist at Ordina (NL) came from the Netherlands to speak at the conference.

“I knew the EARL conference as a visitor and had given some presentations in The Netherlands, so I decided to give it a shot. The staff of the EARL conference are very helpful and open to questions, which made being a speaker very pleasant.” 

Some of our presenters have enjoyed the experience so much they have presented more than once. Chris Billingham, Lead Data Scientist at Manchester Airport Group’s Digital Agency MAG-O, is one such speaker.

“I’ve had the good fortune to present twice at EARL.  I saw it as an opportunity to challenge myself to present at the biggest R conference in the UK.” 

How to submit your abstract. 

Feeling inspired? You can find the abstract submission form on our website. Here’s our recommendations for a successful submission.

• Topic: Your topic can relate to any real-world application of R. We aim to represent a range of industry sectors and a balance of technical and strategic content.

• Clarity: The talk synopsis should provide an overview of the topic and why you believe it will be of interest or resonate with the audience. We suggest an introduction or problem statement alongside any supporting facts that determine the talk objectives or expected takeaways.

• Storytelling: Aim to demonstrate how the tools and techniques you used helped to transform and translate value with a clear and compelling narrative.

• Approval: Before you submit, it’s a good idea to ensure your application has been approved by your wider organisation and or team.

• Novel: Is the application particularly new or innovative? If your application of R is new or distinctive and not widely written about in the industry, please provide as much supporting information as you can for review purposes.

• Target audience: 34% of our attendees are R practitioners and 46% of delegates typically have senior or leadership roles – consider the alignment of your proposal with these audiences.

We hope these hints and tips have been helpful – but feel free to get in touch if you have any questions by contacting debbie.baker@ascent.io. The deadline for submission is 30th June - we can’t wait to hear from you.