WRI Webinar – Russell Edson, Biometry Hub

This webinar series showcases the excellent science our members, affiliates and collaborators are undertaking across the agriculture, food and wine sectors. Expand your network and find new collaborators!

Everyone is welcome – webinars are generally scheduled at 11am on Thursdays, with some exceptions. Registration is required.

Russell Edson  –  Deployment of Shiny apps for data analytics and research output

Biometry Hub and School of Ag, Food and Wine

Abstract:  R and its Shiny App framework have revolutionised the ease with which we may analyse data and disseminate our data science tools and outputs to the wider community. By deploying Shiny apps to the Internet, our end-users can easily explore our data sets, data visualisations and statistical outputs. Various options exist for automated App deployment (including hosted deployments directly on shinyapps.io). However, many of these options are limited in their uptime and data throughputs, which precludes many data science applications. For more sophisticated Shiny Apps, the option of setting up the server ourselves allows for bigger data analysis tasks and ancillary processing.

In this presentation, we will review Shiny Apps and how they empower us and our end-users to explore our data. We will then look at a customised Shiny App deployment with the Etiella Model App (etiellamodel.app, developed in collaboration with Dr Kym Perry and SARDI) that combines the Shiny framework with a backend server running Docker containers and routine scripts. This unseen technical stack works in the background to ensure a robust and turnkey App deployment, together with powerful processing and up-to-date data syncing. Such customised Apps empower us to handle much bigger data analysis tasks and deliver impressive end-user experiences.

The talk aims at researchers curious about Shiny Apps as well as those interested in exploring and extending the data analytics capacities in their research projects and programs.