The Anchr Business Insights team was present at Posit conf::2023

From 18 to 22 September 2023, Thomas Michem and Andre Geertse, both data scientists at Anchr, along with Thomas Wouters, business development manager at Anchr, headed to the USA with one goal in mind: to inspire data gurus and learn a lot themselves. Anchr had a nice booth, and on Wednesday, 20 September, Thomas Michem was on the line-up to speak to over 100 online and live participants about an interesting customer case:

The Belgian Federal Public Service Justice monitors all incoming traffic fines in Belgium daily. The data from all Belgian police departments is centralised and checked for errors and discrepancies. The back office uses a shiny application that shows them the status with a traffic light (green, orange, red). This status is built with Python scripts that compare the number of fines with the number they receive daily. The results of all checks are pushed into a front-end shiny application with a Python Flask API.

"Because Posit's headquarters is located in Boston (USA), conversations with our Posit contacts are held virtually throughout the year. I find that attending this conference significantly strengthens our partnership thanks to the real-life conversations with Samantha Toet, Partner Solutions Engineer at Posit & R Community IDEA at R Consortium, and Katherine Jeschke, Partner Marketing Lead at Posit."

"When you are working daily with the programming languages R & Python, it was definitely worthwhile to attend the numerous workshops and presentations during this edition. The focus was on the Python community with the aim of bringing R and Python users together. What I particularly noticed is that the participants of the conference proactively contributed to the open source community,” says Thomas Wouters.

When it comes to essential data science trends, the conference highlighted them all. Here are some trends and tidbits:

• Discover the tool Quarto. A go-to framework for all your reporting needs, in the broadest sense of the word.
• DuckDB, a lightweight, very fast database for all data transformations that can now utilize the {duckply} package to access DuckDB even more efficiently using dplyr syntax.
• The LLM integration. Github Copilot integration is now possible within Rstudio for quick code suggestions.
• Shiny innovations, for example: ShinyLive for R, runs R-shiny apps in the customer’s browser.

Collecting data and being able to share it smoothly and efficiently with all stakeholders is not a given but highly valuable in these times. 70% of organisations in Belgium and the Netherlands are busy ensuring they collect data correctly according to the right security guidelines and distributing it. Anchr assists them in the visualisation of all available data thanks to the market-leading business intelligence and data science solutions from Oracle, Posit (formerly RStudio), Power BI, and Tableau.