The Business and Industry Section are delighted to announce their section AGM on Thursday 4th of December 2025 between 3:30–4pm, along with a talk entitled “The Lifecycle of an R Package: From Creation to CRAN Maintenance” from 4.00-5.00pm UK time, by Prof. Neil Spencer and Dr Damianos Michaelides.
Both events will be held online. Separate links for the AGM, event booking and further details are included below.
In accordance with the regulations of sections, the following are recommended by the section committee as members of the committee for the 2026:
Officers
Chair: Trevor Duguid Farrant
Vice chair: Andrei Bejan
Secretary: Cristina V. Sargent
Meeting secretary Eli Y. Kling
Committee members
Nigel Marriott
Giuliana Battisti
Michael Baxter
G. Charles-Cadogan
Francesco Sanna Passino
To join the AGM on Thursday 4th of December 2025 between 3:30 – 4pm please use the following registration page link: BIS AGM 2025
To join the event on Thursday 4th of December 2025 between 4.00 – 5.00 pm “The Lifecycle of an R Package: From Creation to CRAN Maintenance” please book via the RSS event page.
Speakers: Prof. Neil Spencer (University of Hertfordshire) and Dr Damianos Michaelides (The Cyprus Institute of Neurology & Genetics and University of Cyprus)
Abstract:
“In this event we will hear from two R package authors about their experiences of creating and maintaining R packages on CRAN. Neil Spencer (University of Hertfordshire) will be talking about the creation of the ANSM5 package, written to accompany the 5th edition of the book “Applied Nonparametric Statistical Methods”, outlining some of the issues, pitfalls and solutions he came across, and demonstrating
that one does not have to be a computer scientist to have a package published on CRAN. Damianos Michaelides (The Cyprus Institute of Neurology & Genetics and University of Cyprus) will then discuss his experiences of carrying out maintenance of the packages fdesigns and hassediagrams on CRAN, looking at the practical challenges of keeping packages up to date with CRAN policies and evolving dependencies.”
Short bios:
Neil Spencer is Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Hertfordshire. He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Chartered Statistician, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. For over thirty years, he has combined traditional academic research with contract research and consultancy work in statistics. He is the (co-)author of three books, including the fifth edition of Applied Nonparametric Statistical Methods (with Nigel Smeeton and Peter Sprent), for which he developed the R package ANSM5. The insights gained from this experience form the basis of his talk at this event.
Damianos Michaelides is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Biostatistics Unit of The Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics and part-time lecturer at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on breast cancer risk assessment and the classification of rare variants of uncertain significance. Damianos previously worked as a Pre-Clinical Principal Statistician at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in London and he holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Southampton, with research focus in the Design of Experiments for dynamically varying variables