In this presentation, James McCaffrey introduced us to the R programming language.
The webcast of the session is available on Channel9, but the content can be summarized by its first slide:
In summary, R is a relatively simple language (though that is subjective) with a rich framework of mathematical functions. It is not the only option - alternatives include MatLab, Maple, and Python with the SciPy library. However, R has a long history and is widely used in data analysis (Microsoft even uses it for Azure Machine Learning).
The speaker then showed several concrete examples alongside the equivalent C# code (which was, unsurprisingly, much longer). In short, he demonstrated many numerical computations on the console:
As the presentation was fairly short, he moved on to explain how to make money in Vegas playing Texas Hold'em Bonus by analyzing hand results with R.
In summary, James gave a quick overview of what R is and why it is used. That said, I would have liked a demo with Azure Machine Learning. Fortunately, the documentation is a good starting point: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/machine-learning-r-quickstart/
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