![R & Spark Instructor, Jim Harner (right), with students. R & Spark Instructor, Jim Harner (right), with students.](https://niss.org/sites/default/files/styles/news_photo/public/news_images/rspark_02a.png?itok=lVWyCMJt)
![R & Spark Workshop taking place at the offices of SAMSI. R & Spark Workshop taking place at the offices of SAMSI.](https://niss.org/sites/default/files/styles/news_photo/public/news_images/rspark_03a.png?itok=m08CLrQZ)
An R & Spark short course took place in the SAMSI offices on September 21-22, 2018. The workshop was well attended and very timely in terms of content, and everything went smoothly as planned! The participants (mostly graduate students from the local universities in Research Triangle Park) were exposed to many new tools and materials.
On the first day, Dr Jim Harner laid the groundwork for the importance of data science with R (covering data sources, transformations, and Hadoop). On the second day, he covered the use of R together in the Spark environment. The event showcased the latest tools for cluster computing and demonstrated how it can be accomplished with R and corresponding R packages.
"The course was extremely useful and helpful for anyone who would be interested in Big Data. In particular, I can speak for myself that I learned many new skills. It was an intense workshop that covered a lot of topics in just two days, but participants were eager to learn this material, and hence there were many questions along the way about the technical aspects of the software environment. The short course even covered machine learning topics on the second day. I believe it was a huge success and would receive even greater enrollment when it is offered again!"
Elvan Ceyhan - Deputy Director, SAMSI