The Department of Statistics would like to invite you to our Weekly Seminar Series. In this seminar, guest speaker Yihui Xie, will be presenting his talk: litedown: A Minimal Re-implementation of the R Markdown Ecosystem.

Summary:
I first came across Sweave in R around 2007 and fell in love with it immediately. Later I learned about the idea behind Sweave, literate programming, and found it quite interesting, too. Literate programming may not be very useful for programming, but is a perfect paradigm for automated report generation. That is, generating (data analysis) reports automatically from computer code. In 2011, I started developing the R package knitr to further explore the potential of literate programming, which achieved some success (especially with the invention of R Markdown), but when looking back after fourteen years, I couldn’t believe that I missed some good ideas that should have been so obvious, and also implemented some ideas so awfully. In this talk, I’ll share some thoughts along the design of a reimagined report generator in R (https://github.com/yihui/litedown) after gaining first-hand experience with R Markdown users in the industry in 2024. I’ll also explain the philosophy and rationale behind some decisions when writing this software package.

About:
Yihui Xie was a software engineer at Posit, PBC from 2013 to 2023. Since 2024, he has been working for Posit, Swiss Re, and Merck as a contractor. He earned his PhD from the Department of Statistics, Iowa State University. He is interested in interactive statistical graphics and statistical computing. As an active R user, he has authored several R packages, such as knitr, bookdown, blogdown, xaringan, animation, DT, tinytex, pagedown, tufte, formatR, fun, servr, and Rd2roxygen, among which the animation package won the 2009 John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award (ASA). He also co-authored a few other R packages, including shiny, rmarkdown, rticles, and leaflet. He has published a number of books, including “Dynamic Documents with R and knitr”, “bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown”, “blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown”, “R Markdown: The Definitive Guide”, and “R Markdown Cookbook.”

In 2006, he founded the Capital of Statistics (cosx.org), which has grown into a large online community on statistics in China. He initiated the Chinese R conference in 2008, and has been involved in organizing R conferences in China since then. During his PhD training at Iowa State University, he won the Vince Sposito Statistical Computing Award (2011) and the Snedecor Award (2012) in the Department of Statistics.