About the Reviewers
Steven Paul Sanderson II is currently in the last year of his MPH (Masters in Public Health Program) at Stony Brook University School of Medicine's Graduate Program in Public Health. He has a decade of experience in working in an acute care hospital setting. Steven is an active user of the StackExchange sites, and his aim is to self-learn several topics, including SQL, R, VB, and Python.
He is currently employed as a decision support analyst III, supporting both financial and clinical programs.
He has had the privilege to work on other titles from Packt Publishing, including, Gephi Cookbook by Devangana Khokhar, Network Graph Analysis and Visualization with Gephi, and Mastering Gephi Network Visualization, both by Ken Cherven. He has also coauthored a book with former professor Phillip Baldwin, called The Pleistocene Re-Wilding of Johnny Paycheck, which can be found as a self-published book at http://www.lulu.com/shop/phillip-baldwin/the-pleistocene-re-wilding-of-johnny-paycheck/paperback/product-21204148.html.
Willem Ligtenberg first started using R at Eindhoven University of Technology for his master's thesis in biomedical engineering. At this time, he used R from Python through Rpy. Although not a true computer scientist, Willem found himself attracted to distributed computing (the bioinformatics field often requires this) by first using a computer cluster of the Computational Biology group. Reading interesting articles on GPGPU computing, he convinced his professor to buy a high-end graphics card for initial experimentation.
Willem currently works as a bioinformatics/statistics consultant at Open Analytics and has a passion for speed enhancement through either Rcpp or OpenCL. He developed the ROpenCL package, which he first presented at UseR! 2011. The RopenCL package will be used later in this book. Willem also teaches parallel computing in R (using both the GPU and CPU). Another interest of his is in how to optimally use databases in workflows, and from this followed another R package (Rango) that he presented at UseR! 2015. Rango allows R users to interact with databases using S4 objects and abstracts differences between various database backends, allowing users to focus on what they want to achieve.
Joseph McKavanagh is a divisional CTO in Kainos and is responsible for technology strategy and leadership. He works with customers in the public and private sectors to deliver and support high-impact digital transformation and managed cloud and big data solutions. Joseph has delivered Digital Transformation projects for central and regional UK governments and spent 18 months as a transformation architect in Government Digital Service, helping to deliver the GDS Exemplar programme. He has an LLB degree in law and accountancy and a master's degree in computer science and applications, both from Queen's University, Belfast.