Queensland Branch meeting: Shiny showcase

Join us as we hear from people who have used shiny to display results and communicate research. There will be three speakers.

Prof Adrian Barnett, Queensland University of Technology

Title: Using shiny to communicate research findings and make life easier for researchers

Shiny is a wonderful tool for disseminating research results by creating interactive pages where users can examine results in detail, for example, by selecting subgroups or changing the model’s assumptions. This can be particularly useful for health economics research, where assumptions can be contested and decisions about the most cost-effective intervention may change. I have also used shiny to make life easier for researchers by creating pages that import publication data from ORCID and enabling researchers create bespoke reports of their publications.

Dr Thomas Guillerme, Macroevolution and Macroecology, Dept of Life Sciences, School of Biological Sciences, St Lucia

Title: Shiny moms: interactive tool for measuring occupancy in multidimensional spaces

Thomas Guillerme is a postdoc at the University of Queensland working with Vera Weisbecker on developing methods for research in macro ecology and macro evolution. I finished a PhD in Zoology at Trinity College Dublin in 2015 where I was supposed to look at the evolutionary history of primates but I ended up falling into R and doing some theoretical biology instead. In general I am interested in understanding how evolution works and how we can analyse the patchy patterns of the fossil records to understand evolutionary processes. In practice though, I mainly do theoretical work by developing methods in phylogenetics, palaeobiology, ecology and statistics (and even some random isotopic analysis) that I implement in R packages or with shiny interfaces. I am also a strong advocate of open source and open science and make all my code free and user friendly onine.

Ross Dwyer, University of Queensland

Title: A new R shiny application to identify global priorities for shark and ray conservation

Ross is a research fellow based at the University of Queensland who designs R-based tools to help decision-makers in reducing spatial conflict between humans and wildlife. His other software includes ZoaTrack.org and the R packages VTrack and Digiroo2.