CovidR is an e-Rum2020 pre-conference event featuring a contest of R contributions around the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contributions can be submitted until May 22nd, and the online e-Rum2020 pre-conference event will be held online on May 29th. Selected contributors will be invited to present their work to the community at the event, where the CovidR contest winner(s) will be announced and will receive their e-prizes. Finally, the best overall contribution will also be invited to present at the main e-Rum2020 conference (June 17th-20th).
Attendance to the event is for free, and tickets are available until May 22nd. Additional information on how to access the event will be provided to all ticket holders closer to the event.
The contest in the right context — Due to the relevance of the topic, we would like to clarify some points so that both the participants and their audience correctly engage with the CovidR contest.
The COVID-19 data assets made available by authoritative institutions are immensely useful. However, their incompleteness and differences in collection policies may open up to misunderstanding and miscommunication. Data scientists should force themselves to be responsible data narrators and communicators. To what extent can Rstats be a tool for data narrative? Can we use our tools to uncover missing data and data wrong-doing? A beautiful visualization is not necessarily about beautiful data, but it’s beautiful when it allows people to understand what we know as well as (more often) what we actually do not.
The CovidR contest is mostly about R analytics technicalities and for data geeks, but it’s open to data scientists, analysts, academics and researchers that may use the single simplest R function, but just on the right question, at the right time, tackling the many doubts cast by this so vast paradigmatic change we’re all living. Being original in the contest means being able to address different aspects of the pandemic. The CovidR contest is looking for such excellence and originality and we will also judge how R analytics can be an efficient and valid technical service to this effort and in such a context.
An internal jury will pick the winner(s) by evaluating:
The winner(s) will be announced during the pre-conference event on May 29th.
If you have general questions you can always contact us at covidrcontest@erum.io, otherwise we recommend using the Issue / Pull Request submission mechanism as a channel for discussing how you can submit your contribution.