Episode 13: Interview with Yihui Xie

It’s an episode of firsts on the R-Podcast! In this episode recorded on location I had the honor and privilege of interviewing Yihui Xie, author of many innovative packages such as knitr and animation. Some of the topics we discussed include: Yihui’s motivation for creating knitr and some key new features, how markdown plays a key role in making reproducible research more accessible, and an innovative approach for publishing and maintaining reproducible statistical results online, and much more on this ‘lucky’ episode 13 of the R-Podcast!

Show Notes

Resources mentioned during interview with Yihui

Yihui’s GitHub page: github.com/yihui/knitr
Yihui’s blog: yihui.name
ROxygen2 package for easy creating R package documentation
Yihui’s Rmini package on GitHub
The knitr package home page and GitHub repository
Using knitr and Sweave in Rstudio documentation
The knitr mailing list and recent knitr questions on StackOverflow
Vistat reproducible gallery of statistical graphics

R Community Roundup

R version 3.0.0 highlights as well as version 3.0.1 highlights

Package pick

Pandoc: Powerful and customizable document conversion

How to interact with the show

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Music Credits

The opening theme is entitled “Super Fighting Robot X” by WillRock from the Megaman X: Maverick Rising Album at ocremix.org
The closing theme is entitled “Countdown to Infinity” by WillRock from the Megaman X: Maverick Rising Album at ocremix.org

Yihui Xie

Yihui Xie is a software engineer at RStudio. Yihui got his PhD from the Department of Statistics, Iowa State University. He is interested in interactive statistical graphics, statistical computing, and web applications. He is an active R user and the author of several R packages, such as animation, formatR, Rd2roxygen, knitr, bookdown, and blogdown, among which the animation package won the 2009 John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award (ASA). He is also the author of the books “Dynamic Documents with R and knitr”, “bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown”, and “blogdown: Creating websites with R Markdown”. In 2006 he founded the “Capital of Statistics”, which has grown into a large online community on statistics in China. He initiated the first Chinese R conference in 2008 and has been organizing R conferences in China since then. During his PhD training at the Iowa State University, he won the Vince Sposito Statistical Computing Award (2011) and the Snedecor Award (2012) in the Department of Statistics.

Eric Nantz

Eric Nantz is a principal research scientist at a large life sciences company, creating innovative analytical pipelines and capabilities supporting study designs and analyses. Outside of his day job, Eric is passionate about connecting with the R community as the creator/host of the R-Podcast, Shiny Developer Series, and a curator / podcast host for the R Weekly project. Plus, he likes to share his adventures with R and general computing on Twitch livestreams at twitch.tv/rpodcast.

Episode 13: Interview With Yihui Xie