Hack-at-it 2010

Members of the team met for the second time in 2010, to work on a new interactive graphics canvas for R. The current stage of the project can be found at R-forge: qtinterfaces contains the new canvas, and plumbr contains the new mutable data frame structures which will enable linking between plots.

The goal is to have working examples by the end of summer 2010.

Hack-at-it 2009

The annual GGobi hack-at-it was held June 5-7 in Ames Iowa. The main directions of work are

• Development of a new canvas for R supporting interactive and dynamic graphics. Michael is leading the effort on this. Higher level routines for supporting brushing and linking are progressing, and the design will follow the pipeline ideas expressed in the 2008 Computational Statistics paper.
• A tourr package is coming along for running tours, of many varieties, and allowing experimentation with tours, directly in R. This will eventually be integrated with the new canvas to allow brushing on the tour projections. A GUI has also been developed.
• A simple GUI for interactive mosaic plots in R has been developed.
• Another package developing templates for composite plots, such as pairs plots for multivariate data containing different types of variables is coming along. This is inspired by Jay Emerson's gpairs function in the YaleToolkit.

2009 Chambers award winner announced

We are pleased to announce that the judges of the Chambers Award have selected the winner of the 2009 competition: Yihui Xie, from the Renmin University of China. Yihui received this year's award for his submission "animation," an R package for using graphical and other animations to communicate the results of statistical simulations.

In addition to the US$1000 prize, the winner will have his JSM registration paid by the Computing Section and be reimbursed up to US$1000 for travel and housing at the meeting. As usual, the award will be presented at the Section's business meeting/mixer on Monday evening.

The judges for this year's competition were Torsten Hothorn, Simon Urbanek, and Hadley Wickham. Thanks to the judges for their hard work, dedication, and timeliness in making this year's competition a success.

J.R. Lockwood
The RAND Corporation
Awards Chair, ASA Statistical Computing and Graphics Sections

GGobi and Choreography

You might be interested in this rather unusual use of GGobi - to explore and understand dance! Noel Cressie, Ola Ahlqvist, and Hyowon Ban from the Ohio State University have been involved in a collaborative project centred around a William Forsythe modern-dance piece called "One Flat Thing, reproduced. See their contribution, "Statistical counterpoint", and learn more about their work.

Updated version of GGobi: 2.1.8

We've just posted an updated version of GGobi - version 2.1.8. This version fixes a number of small bugs, particularly with the
DescribeDisplay plugin. If you are on windows, make sure to also update to the latest version of gtk linked from the downloads page. Unfortunately we have been having problems with the mac package, so only linux and windows versions are currently available.

All files are available from http://ggobi.org/downloads

Please us know if you run into any problems.

GGobi in Wikipedia

GGobi now has an entry in Wikipedia. Feel free to edit it!

Hack-at-it 2008

The 2008 Hack-at-it was held June 22-23, just before Data Vis VI, in Bremen Germany.

The main topics for the meeting were:

• Release of 2.1.7
  
• Continued design of GGobi 3
  

New material on the GGobi book web page

The GGobi book is now available from Springer and Amazon, after quite a delay. Getting the figures printed correctly was difficult.

Solutions to the exercises in the back of each chapter are available for instructors by emailing Springer.

The movies on the book web site are currently being updated to include sound.