Curriculum Vitae

2024-09-18

Yihui Xie

Contact Information

Email: [email protected]; Homepage: https://yihui.org; Mastodon @[email protected]; Twitter @xieyihui.

Brief Biography

Yihui Xie was a software engineer at Posit, PBC from 2013 to 2023. Since 2024, he has been working for Posit, Swiss Re, and Merck as a contractor. He earned his PhD from the Department of Statistics, Iowa State University. He is interested in interactive statistical graphics and statistical computing. As an active R user, he has authored several R packages, such as knitr, bookdown, blogdown, xaringan, animation, DT, tinytex, pagedown, tufte, formatR, fun, servr, and Rd2roxygen, among which the animation package won the 2009 John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award (ASA). He also co-authored a few other R packages, including shiny, rmarkdown, rticles, and leaflet. He has published a number of books, including “Dynamic Documents with R and knitr”, “bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown”, “blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown”, “R Markdown: The Definitive Guide”, and “R Markdown Cookbook.”

In 2006, he founded the Capital of Statistics (https://cosx.org), which has grown into a large online community on statistics in China. He initiated the Chinese R conference in 2008, and has been involved in organizing R conferences in China since then. During his PhD training at Iowa State University, he won the Vince Sposito Statistical Computing Award (2011) and the Snedecor Award (2012) in the Department of Statistics.

Professional Interests

Reproducible research; statistical computing; statistical graphics; data visualization.

Education Background

Honors & Awards

Publications

See my Google Scholar page for a full list of publications.

In English

Books and book chapters:

  1. Yihui Xie, Christophe Dervieux, Emily Riederer (2020). R Markdown Cookbook. Chapman & Hall/CRC. ISBN 9780367563837.
  2. Yihui Xie, J. J. Allaire, Garrett Grolemund (2018). R Markdown: The Definitive Guide. Chapman & Hall/CRC. ISBN 9781138359338.
  3. Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas, Alison Presmanes Hill (2017). blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown. Chapman & Hall/CRC. ISBN 9780815363729.
  4. Yihui Xie (2016). bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN 9781138700109
  5. Yihui Xie (2015). Dynamic Documents with R and knitr. 2nd edition. Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN 978-1498716963
  6. Yihui Xie (2014). knitr: A Comprehensive Tool for Reproducible Research in R. In Victoria Stodden, Friedrich Leisch and Roger D. Peng, editors, Implementing Reproducible Computational Research. Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN 978-1466561595

Papers:

  1. Yihui Xie, Heike Hofmann, and Xiaoyue Cheng (2014). Reactive Programming for Interactive Graphics. Statistical Science, 29(2), 201-213. (PDF)
  2. Yihui Xie (2013). animation: An R Package for Creating Animations and Demonstrating Statistical Methods. Journal of Statistical Software, 53(1), 1-27. URL http://www.jstatsoft.org/v53/i01/

In Chinese

Books:

  1. Peng Zhao, Yihui Xie, Xiangyun Huang (2021). Modern Statistical Graphics. Posts & Telecom Press Co., Ltd. ISBN 9787115566904.
  2. R Ninja (under development)

Papers:

  1. Yihui Xie, 2008. On the Applications of Statistical Graphics in Data Analysis, Statistics Review, Bo Zhang (ed), China Financial and Economic Publishing House.
  2. Yihui Xie, Yu Zhu, 2008. Bootstrap Methods: Developments and Frontiers, Statistics & Information Forum, 89, 90-96.
  3. Yihui Xie, 2007. The Application of the Classification and Regression Tree Based on the Package rpart in R, Statistics & Information Forum, 86, 67-70.
  4. Yihui Xie, 2007. Series in International Competitiveness: How Weak is the Financial System of China?, China Statistics, 7, 35.
  5. Yanyun Zhao, Yihui Xie, 2006. Unbalanced growth in top 100 industrial enterprises in China: market expanding outgoes business managing, Talents, 9, 84.
  6. Yanyun Zhao, Yihui Xie, 2005. Who is the champion of growth among top 1000 industrial enterprises in China: analysis on the capability of market expanding and aggregate efficiency, Talents, 9, 72-73.

Besides, I published several articles in the Capital of Statistics in Chinese.

Professional Experience

I worked for RStudio (later rebranded to Posit) as a software engineer from 2013 to 2023, and have been writing software tools for data visualization, reproducible research, and automatic reporting/document generation.

I worked on Shiny from late 2013 to mid-2015. From late 2014, I started working on the DT package for displaying tables. At about the same time, I worked extensively on the leaflet package for interactive maps, to bring it to the HTML widgets framework. My 2015 was primarily spent on these two packages.

In early 2016, I created a new package named tufte, to add the Tufte style to R Markdown documents and support both HTML and PDF output formats. I started the bookdown project in late 2015 to make it easier to write books and technical documents with R Markdown, and most of my time in 2016 was spent on this project. I also published a book for the bookdown package with Chapman & Hall/CRC in 2016.

Since late 2016, I started the blogdown project, to create websites based on R Markdown. The package was finished, and the companion book was published by Chapman & Hall/CRC in 2017.

I spent the first half of 2018 on writing the book “R Markdown: The Definitive Guide” (published in July), and the last few months on the R package pagedown.

I was not very productive in 2019. There was too much maintainence work for me to do for my R packages. I planned to write the R Markdown Cookbook, but didn’t finish it until the summer of 2020. After that, I started to pay the huge amount of tech debt accumulated due to the hard time of COVID and the writing of the aforementioned book. I revamped the blogdown package in the second half of 2020.

Since the September of 2019, I had been more and more overwhelmed by the workload. 2020 had been quite a traumatic year to me (perhaps to everyone else, too). Fortunately, the tech debt started to appear manageable at the end of the first half of 2021.

I became a freelancer in 2024.

Internship

  1. Summer 2012, AT&T Labs Research, Florham, NJ (mentor: Simon Urbanek)
  2. Summer 2013, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (mentor: Raphael Gottardo)

Website Management

Sept 2003 - Present

I created and maintained websites for:

I founded and have been maintaining:

I worked in these web studios:

Conference Organization

Feb 2005 - Present

I initiated the Chinese R conference in 2008, and organized

I helped organize these conferences:

Other Work Experience

Sep 2004 - present

Duties in associations & centers:

Projects participated:

Presentations & Tutorials

Most of my slides were generated from R Markdown (especially the ones in recent years). To download the R Markdown source documents, simply replace the extension .html with .Rmd in the address bar of your web browser.

Computer Skills

I like playing with computer tools for building web pages and statistical computation & graphics. I often try to improve the efficiency of my work by creating software tools (i.e. work hard to be lazy).

Listed above are what I’m familiar with, and the ones being crossed out are due to my brain stack overflow and I do garbage collection in my brain once in a while.

Software Packages

I support open source software, and below is a list of open source packages that I’m involved with.

R packages:

I’m the creator and main author of:

I have contributed to:

PHP applications:

Misc