Researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi develop the region’s first CRAN mirror

NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Research Scientist Amar Ahmad has developed the Arab region’s first CRAN Mirror. A CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) is a network of FTB and web servers around the world that store identical, up-to-date versions of code, data and documentation for R, an open-source, powerful, and highly expandable free statistical software that can be easily shared with other researchers around the world.

The Mirror will allow R users in the region to install R packages from the NYUAD-CRAN mirror, reducing long-distance Internet traffic for R users in Arab countries.

Research Scientist Amar Ahmad said: “The NYUAD-CRAN Mirror will provide scientific support to NYUAD researchers and students as well as other academic institutions and organizations in the UAE and GCC countries. This will push forward the boundaries of expertise in research and data analysis in powerful and interdisciplinary ways, helping us respond to vital local and global challenges.”

R provides a wide range of statistical methods, including standard statistical functions (e.g. mean and median) and tests to compare two groups (e.g. smokers vs non-smokers), as well as generalized linear calculations (investigating the relationship between consumption and income) and graphical techniques (e.g. histograms, boxplots and scatterplots).

In general, R packages increase the performance of the statistical software R by improving existing basic functions of R or by adding new ones. More than 19,000 R packages are currently available.

It is likely that the NYUAD-CRAN mirror will be the only CRAN mirror in the UAE and possibly the wider GCC, as no more than one mirror per country is accepted by the Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). 

The NYUAD-CRAN mirror is now available for R users to install R packages and libraries, implying that the NYUAD-CRAN will raise awareness of NYUAD and the UAE within the R language research community. It reflects NYUAD’s ongoing support for the R community by providing webspace for the R Project.