SatRday Cape Town Conference at UCT in March

15 Jan 2018
15 Jan 2018

The R community and some of South Africa's most forward thinking companies have come together to bring satRday back to Cape Town. This conference provides an opportunity to hear from and network with top researchers, data scientists and developers from the R community in South Africa and beyond.

This year satRday is being held at UCT in the middle of March. It will consist of two days of workshops (15th and 16th March) and a one-day conference (17th March).

This year there will be two workshops lead by our Keynote speakers: R Package Development  and The Sport Statistician's Toolbox

There will also be a Data Carpentry workshop for R novices including introductory computational skills needed for data management and analysis in all domains of research. 

A brief introduction to our Keynote Speakers: 

Dr Stephanie Kovalchik, the lead data scientist in the Game Insight Group at Tennis Australia, the governing body of tennis in Australia, and a Research Fellow in sports analytics at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Active Living at Victoria University. Her research focuses on the use of statistical methods to understand performance, game strategy, and mentality in high-performance tennis. Stephanie received her PhD in statistics from UCLA and her Bachelor’s of Science from Caltech. Stephanie is an avid R user and the author of several packages, including RISmed (an R interface to NCBI databases) and deuce (a package for tennis analytics). She is also the creator of the tennis analytics blog On the T. 

Maëlle Salmon a data scientist with experience mostly in public health, both in infectious disease and environmental epidemiology. She holds a PhD in statistics from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and has lived in several European countries. She is a very enthusiastic R user and loves sharing her passion, with involvement in the community including blogging, co-founding the R-Ladies Barcelona meetup, package development and being a co-editor at rOpenSci, providing an onboarding system for R package developers.

Presentation proposals for satRday are also now open! These can be submitted in three formats, a Tutorial (60 minutes), Standard talk (20 minutes) and a speedy Lightning talk (5  minutes). All successful speakers will have the added bonus of having their tickets refunded.

Important dates:


2018-01-20: Early-Bird Registration Deadline


2018-02-03: Tutorial & Talk Submission Deadline

2018-03-03: Registration Deadline

2018-03-15/16: Data Carpentry Workshop

2018-03-16: satRday Workshops

2018-03-17: Conference 2018-03-17

Visit the website for more.