[Keynote] Some things you can’t read from a NEWS file - Torsten Hothorn

Some things you can’t read from a NEWS file
Torsten Hothorn, University of Zürich
Longterm package maintenance comes with its own challenges and benefits. While NEWS files document technical histories of packages, the non-technical, methodological and social aspects of package development are rarely discussed in a wider audience. Based on personal experience, this keynote presentation will shed some light on motivations, frustrations, benefits and challenges associated with the self-assigned task of keeping a package alive over decades.
Torsten Hothorn is Professor of Biostatistics ad personam at the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute of the University of Zurich.
He received a Diploma in Statistics from the University of Dortmund in 2000 and a Dr. rerum naturalium in 2003 from the same university. From 2000 to 2007 he worked as a PhD student and later as PostDoc and lecturer at the Institute for Medical Informatics, Biometry, and Epidemiology of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 2007 he accepted a position as Professor of Biostatistics at the Department of Statistics of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Since April 2013 he is faculty member of the Medical Faculty and the Faculty of Science of the University of Zurich. Torsten Hothorn is ordinary member of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing since 2014 and elected member of the Academia Europaea since 2022. Currently, he serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Software and as Associate Editor of Statistical Methods in Medical Research.