shiny

The Challenge The Fair Work Convention, set up by the Scottish government, acts as an advisory body to Scottish Ministers. The requirement was the creation of an R-Shiny application for public consumption which allows policymakers, ministers and members of the public to explore the current status of key indicators within the Fair Work Measurement Framework. The resultant application would then be handed back to the Scottish Government. The Project Jumping Rivers developed an R Shiny dashboard solution for the exploration of data.

The Challenge The environment sector generates vast amounts of data and wish to share this data to drive local action. At a Water Hub Hackathon the Environment Agency (EA) presented their current platform. Their current platform includes critical measurements used in determining overall quality of water bodies, and thus used for identifying potential projects and impact. Our winning submission included the ability to subscribe to data updates, improved visualisation, ability to look at multiple regions at once, improved user experience and modularity.

The Challenge Prior to engagement with Jumping Rivers, Fujifilm used an Excel-based tool for experimental risk assessments. This tool collated all data surrounding the process, including, experimental parameters, comments, recommendations, plus scoring data for a number of metrics. The tool was difficult to update and prone to breaking due to the rigid structure imposed by Excel. Further, versioning the reports and keeping track of the data was impossible without some central management of the process for updating the document.

The Challenge The client’s in-house data science team had developed a Shiny application using the RStudio desktop IDE. The client wished to develop this Shiny application into a product/service that may be provided to their own clients. The application the client required a thorough code review for performance and security with certain aspects needing further development (both in-house, and with Jumping Rivers’ support). This included integration with a new, secure data management service and integration with an existing user authentication service.

Don’t we all miss 2019 (blame Covid for the long delay in this post). The days of going to work and seeing your work colleagues face to face - and for some of you, attending one of our on-site training courses! 2019 was a great year for us. Not only have we broken new boundaries, we have recruited new full-time staff which have furthermore contributed to the glowing success of the company.

So RStudio Connect has embraced Python and now runs Flask applications! At Jumping Rivers we make a lot of use of R, shiny, and Python for creating visual tools for our clients. Shiny has a lot of nice features, in particular it is very fast for prototyping web applications. Over our morning meeting we discussed the fact that flask will soon be coming to RStudio products and wondered how easy it would be to recreate one of the simple shiny examples as a flask application.

At Jumping Rivers we’re always to want to branch into the data science community, and so this year we’re going to quite a few conferences in the autumn. You can catch us at: GSS (Government Statistical Service) Conference - Edinburgh From the 1-2 October, our very own Esther Gillespie (CEO) and Seb Mellor (Data Engineer) will be attending the GSS conference in Edinburgh. If you see them, feel free to chat or ask for some merch!

We’re RStudio Trainers! Big news. RStudio recently started certifying trainers in three areas: the tidyverse, Shiny and teaching. To be certified to teach a topic you have to pass the exam for that topic and the teaching exam. Even bigger news. Four of your lovely Jumping Rivers trainers are now certified to teach at least one topic! Check out the RStudio certified trainers page to see me (Theo Roe), Rhian Davies, Colin Gillespie and Roman Popat in action!

I love R and I love Shiny. One of the things I really like about shiny is the ease with which you can incorporate other Javascript based tools and libraries. By my own admission, my JavaScript skills are definitely lacking but there are so many cool libraries out there which can really make visualisation and interaction with displayed content come alive. One such library I came across about a while ago now is annyang.

The Main Competition The Secondary Competition What next? The results of the eRum competition are in! Before we announce the winners we would like to thank everyone who entered. It has been a pleasure to look at all of the ideas on show. The Main Competition The winner of the main competition is Lukasz Janiszewski. Lukasz provided a fantastic visualisation of the locations of each R user/ladies group and all R conferences.