 Hi and welcome to Esmerconf 2022. We're thrilled to have you here with us, whether you're watching live or in catch up during the week or later during the year. We have a really exciting program of presentations, workshops and hackathons that we can't wait to share with you. But before we do, I wanted to share some thoughts from our family here at Esmerconf about why open source, open education and free events like Esmerconf are so important. So Wolfgang, what's so great about software like R? Free and open source software like R has many advantages. Of course, you don't have to pay for it, which is nice. But more importantly, it gives you access to the underlying routine so you can actually verify the calculations and we can modify and extend its capabilities to the benefit of all users. And why is it vital that people don't have to pay to attend conferences like Esmerconf? Along the same lines, making training and capacity building events like Esmerconf free, we can break down barriers. So instead of making such training only accessible to a small privileged group, we can make it available to all. And Janna, what did participation in last year's Esmerconf and the evidence synthesis hackathon mean to you? ESH is just such a great community of practice. That's what really drew me to the group. My coding skills are quite limited, but regardless, I really got a lot from participating in last year's conference and meeting people in the group. And I just think that folks are really welcoming and kind and through that, you find solutions for your own work. So that's just been fantastic. And Kira, why is accessibility at Esmerconf so important, do you think? Esmerconf reduces barriers to underrepresented groups by making the conference free to attend, by ensuring that the conference is more accessible, by verifying the closed captions used, by making all the content free and easy to watch when your schedule allows, which is particularly important to me as a busy working mum. And I think that it's focused being on a software that is free and open source, really allows the audience to have a greater access to implement and learn everything that will be covered this week. And Gavin, why do you think what we're trying to do here at Esmerconf is so important? The evidence synthesis hackathon and conference contribute hugely to capacity building for eBX. There are currently many challenges for evidence synthesis globally. Policymakers in the science community itself are the straightingly resistant to change, frequently relying on poorly synthesized evidence, evidence assembled using inherently biased methods or excessive over reliance on expert opinion. One glimmer of light is provided by this community and especially the early career researchers who support and facilitate its development. Keep working on methods and applications. The change is coming and it will be open and evidence-based. Thanks so much, everyone. Hopefully we'll have you all convinced by the end of this week. So a little bit about Esmerconf in the Esmerconf series. It was established in 2020 and we had our first event in 2021, last year, Esmerconf 2021. The aims of this event series are to build a community of practice on the use of R for evidence synthesis and meta-analysis, to support the development of and showcase novel tools and frameworks for evidence synthesis and meta-analysis in R, to build capacity for the use of R in evidence synthesis and meta-analysis, and to raise awareness of the need for rigor in evidence synthesis and meta-analysis. This week, we'll see presentations on packages that are designed to assist reviewers across evidence synthesis stages from planning to communication. We'll see demonstrations that integrate evidence synthesis packages into an interoperable pipeline in R. We'll hear about novel applications of existing R packages, but in an evidence synthesis context. We'll hear about efforts to automate evidence synthesis in R and we'll learn about how we can assist novices to R in performing evidence synthesis with the aid of graphical user interfaces. We've also got a suite of training workshops. As I said, two have already started this week and we have a total of six that you can dive into. Hopefully, you've been able to register. If not, you can watch those live and most of them you can watch in catch up. And we also have two exciting hackathons that I'm looking forward to introducing later. And we'll hear at the end of the week how they progressed. You can follow their progress on the ES Hackathon website. You're familiar with my face now, but just to introduce who I am, I'm Neil Hadaway. I'm a senior research fellow at SEI, ZELF and the Africa Center for Evidence. Emily Hennessey is the Associate Director of Biostatistics at the Recovery Research Institute and a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School. Keira Keenan is a senior research and development manager at the National Children's Bureau. Yanastaya Nova is a researcher in clinical pharmacology at the University of Valparaiso. Matt Granger is a researcher in biodiversity conservation, sustainability and wildlife management at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Alex Banach-Brown is a postdoc in biomedical research at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité. Chris Pritchard is a senior lecturer in paramedic practice and emergency care at Nottingham Trent University. And last but not least, Kyle Hamilton is a PhD candidate in psychological sciences at the University of California in Merced. This is the organizing team who've been working hard over the last year to bring you an exciting program. But we also wanted to give a shout out to other people who are helping our organization, people who are providing workshops, people who are working in the hackathons, and you'll get to see their faces as the week goes on. But thanks also to you for coming along and to our presenters for submitting their work that we're going to hear about. The ESMCONF is hosted by the Evidence Synthesis Hackathon and you can find out more about ESH by looking at their websites at eshackathon.org. The Evidence Synthesis Hackathon was established in 2017 by myself and Martin Westgate. We host events that aim to develop frameworks and tools relevant to evidence synthesis and meta-analysis. So far we've had 31 projects and that number is increasing rapidly. One of the key things that we organize is the ESMCONF conference series with the aim of training, showcasing and promoting collaboration. And we have a growing library of tools that you can find on the ESH Hackathon website, including some that you may already have heard of, predictor, RobVis, Prisma 2020 flow diagrams, citation chaser, metadata, which we'll hear a little bit about later this week in the hackathon as well, and Evie Atlas. I also wanted to give a shout out to our funders who've been really generous in their support for us this year. Firstly, Code for Science and Society have provided us with $17,000 for this year and next year to enable provision of bursaries for people with caregiving and resource constraints to enable them to attend the conference. They've also helped to fund the transcription and verification of subtitles for all of our recordings. I also wanted to shout out to our donors. We have a small number of people who've already provided a little bit of funding to help us keep ESMCONF free forever. So if you're interested in finding out more, you can visit our fiscal host, Open Collective, and find out more about how you might be able to support us. But for now I wanted to hand over to Angela Ocune from Code for Science and Society to explain a little bit more about what they do and why supporting us is important. Hello, my name is Angela Ocune and I'm the Senior Program Manager of the Event Fund at Code for Science and Society. At Code for Science and Society, what we call CSNS for short, we seek to enhance the power of data to improve lives. And towards this, we really invest in social, organizational infrastructure as a critical foundation for effective research and technology initiatives. We believe that to have a healthy and robust ecosystem of community-centered research data and technology, we really need to care for and invest in social, technical infrastructure. What do we mean by that? The governance, the culture, and the social practices that really intersect, shape, underlie, all technical work. So one of CSNS' programs is the Event Fund, which I lead, and the Event Fund directly invests in emerging community leaders around the world to help support the organizing of events around research-focused data science. And so the events and communities that we fund are really trying to cultivate relationships and skills that are needed for more equitable next-generation science. I'm very excited and lucky to get to work with such an amazing team of organizers around the world who are all really trying to tackle the complex challenges of the 21st century. They can range from climate change, resource inequities, global health crises, and it's exciting because we really need more robust, collaborative, transnational research networks to tackle these kinds of complex issues with diverse data capacities. So I am very happy to be supporting the ESMR conference. I hope that you all have an amazing learning, networking time, and take care. Thanks so much, Angela. Before we move on, I want to give some important notices first around accessibility and our accessibility policy. ESMRConf is fully online, and what we've tried to do is to provide the conference in as many formats as possible. So people can watch live in catch up during the week by focusing on individual talks or the full recorded live stream or indeed any time in the future. We do focus on English as the primary spoken language, but in this case, it's allowed us to verify subtitles so that you can translate them into any other language. And so the subtitles for all of the individual recorded talks have already been verified and you can translate them automatically within YouTube by clicking on close captions, exploring the menu and selecting the language you want to read through auto translate. We also want to say that translation services and signing service costs are included and prioritized in all of our grant applications. It's a really important thing for us. But we know that we can always do more. So we really do welcome feedback in whatever format you want to provide it. And you can find details of how to provide feedback along with our complaints procedure that I'll explain in a couple of slides in the accessibility policy linked to from the EsmerConf website. Next up, our code of conduct. And we as organizers and moderators of the conference, but also we as a community of people participating in the conference, commit that people will be treated with dignity and respect regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. At all times people's feelings will be valued and respected. Language or humor that people find offensive will not be used, for example, sexist or racist jokes or terminology which is derogatory to someone with a disability. No one will be harassed, abused or intimidated on the grounds of his or her race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, disability or age. And incidents of harassment will be taken very seriously. We hope that you agree with this code of conduct and that you will also commit to what we feel these really important commitments. As with our accessibility policy we know that we can always be doing more. So if you have any comments about our code of conduct please do provide them as well. And then finally I wanted to detail how you can raise a concern or complaint or provide feedback. Any participant or organizer of the evidence synthesis hackathon or ESMACONF who feels they have been treated unfairly on the grounds of a protected characteristic that I described in the last slide, I encourage to raise their concerns with an organizer or anonymously if they desire. You can email myself, the conference organizer or my line manager at the Stockholm Environment Institute using those email addresses and their providers in the code of conduct and accessibility policy document as well. You can email another member of the conference organizing team and you can find out their details by following the link from the ES hackathon events page. And you can use an anonymous form by following this link, bit.ly slash ESMACONF underscore feedback. And all submissions will be investigated and details of how they'll be investigated are provided in the code of conduct and accessibility policy document as well, which you can get following this link. So on to ESMACONF again and I wanted to explain a little bit about ESMACONF 2021. We were really shocked and thrilled at how people engaged with the conference last year considering it was the first time that we'd run it. So I just wanted to give you some numbers. These are some numbers that we published at the end of the week last year. We had 514 people register last year from 26 different countries. We had 39 presentations with 10 panel discussions and four workshops. And our viewing statistics from YouTube were really great. During the week we had 650 unique viewers and you can see how the views and viewers were distributed between live and on demand. We had a total of 3,558 video views during the week and we got a total of 175 new subscribers. So thank you so much for everybody who took part last week. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we did. But also I wanted to show that since last year the videos for ESMACONF 2021 have been viewed more than 9,300 times. We have a total of 339 subscribers now from last year. And you can see some of the viewing statistics here that show over the last 365 days how the main, the top, I think five it is, videos have been viewed. So there are some interesting spikes where people suddenly discover some of the conference material. And this includes both the live streams and individual recordings, individual presentations. And I wanted to give a shout out to our most popular video from last year. This seven minute video from Luke McGinnis introducing his package, RobViz, for visualizing risk of bias assessments. So congratulations to Luke. It was a really exciting presentation. And he can claim 3.6% of the total channel views from last year. That's really impressive. Well done, Luke. So last year we had a really interesting body of presentations. This year we've got an equally interesting set of presentations. We have 28 presentations in total. We've separated those across eight special sessions from review processes from A to Z, graphical user interfaces, quantitative synthesis, particularly network meta analysis, other quantitative synthesis methods, quantitative synthesis with a Bayesian lens, building an evidence ecosystem for tool design and developing the synthesis community. We also have six workshops this year. Yesterday we had a full day workshop by Wolfgang Wichtbauer on an introduction to meta analysis in R that was streamed to Twitch. We also had a quick dive into searching for studies in meta analysis and evidence synthesis by Alison Bethel. Later today we've got our first workshop of the day with collaborative coding and version control in introduction to Git and GitHub from Mac Granger. We have a workshop early tomorrow morning on the collaboration for environmental evidence and what it can do for you, for those of you who don't know, the calibration for environmental evidence or CE is one of the main systematic review coordinating bodies that provides guidance and support and publishes systematic reviews on environmental science. We have a workshop then later tomorrow on structural equation modeling. I should say that CE workshop is being run by Ruth Garzide. The structural equation modeling workshop is being run by Aaron Dan Basu. And then finally on Thursday morning rather, we have the introduction to writing R functions and packages workshop that's being run by Martin Westgate. So thanks very much for all our amazing workshop coordinators who are providing those workshops entirely for free. Workshops two to six will be recorded and available online forever. If you want to watch more from Wolfgang and you've missed his workshop, you'll have to catch up with him on one of his many other workshops that he regularly provides. But thanks so much to everybody for providing this really amazing set of resources in capacity building around meta analysis and evidence synthesis. It's really wonderful that these are all free. So thank you so much. I'm also really excited this week to introduce two hackathons. Within the evidence synthesis hackathon series, we regularly run hackathons, but this time at EsmerConf, we also have two hackathons that are running parallel. So when people aren't watching sessions and aren't in workshops themselves, people within these groups will be diving off to try to produce a minimum viable product, a working product in each case that aims to answer a need for a set of functions or tools in R. And there's a particular emphasis in both these projects on graphical user interfaces so that people without experience and coding ability in R will be able to make use of them. So the first one is a package called Sitesource. This is going to be an R package and a shiny web app that allows people to upload their search results and maybe their screening results in an RIS file, multiple RIS files from different sources and then identify which databases or which search strings, which different sources of information are most influential in their search results and the stages of their inclusion so that you can see what the level of overlap is between your different sources, perhaps which databases you might want to include as a priority which might not contribute anything unique. The team behind this is a really great strong team with experience in DG application and tool design. So we're really looking forward to what Trevor and his team can produce. We'll hear more about that in the closing ceremony on Thursday. Our second hackathon is being led by Wolfgang Wichtbauer and his team. This relates to Metadat, which is an existing package on CRAN that collates a large collection of meta-analytic datasets that are useful for teaching purposes and for validating published analyses and other development of meta-analytic methods. Wolfgang and his team want to improve the package and to provide a shiny interface so that people can access those datasets and search for those datasets without having to use R, which is really exciting. Wolfgang and his team have asked if anybody has available datasets from meta-analysis, you can provide those to him by email. The idea is to make these datasets as widely accessible as possible as examples. So please do get in touch with him if you think you have any useful data. And as well, as Macon 2022, we have to thank all of you for registering and attending. So far, as of Sunday, at least we had 770 people register, which is a huge increase on last year. You can see the spread of people across time zones, which emphasizes that there are a lot of people from Central Europe, but also from the East Coast of the US who registered. And it shows that we perhaps need to do a little bit more work to show the benefits of watching this conference and catch up. But anybody who comes along afterwards can watch the conference materials without needing to register once the conference has started. But we're really thrilled that so many people have engaged with the conference so far. We are looking forward to engaging with you as the week goes on. So now, before we really get stuck in, I wanted to explain how the EsmarConf conference is going to work exactly. All of our workshops from now on workshops two to six are happening via Zoom with a registration. So if you've managed to register already, that's great. If you haven't registered for one of the upcoming workshops, see if there's still space to register. But all of those workshops are also being live streamed to Zoom. So if you don't make it into the registered Zoom, you'll be able to catch up live and catch up afterwards with a recording, both on YouTube. And access to any materials that you might need in the workshops are going to be provided as links. All of our live, all of our special sessions are live streamed to YouTube. So the main way to interact with the conference is via our YouTube channel. And you can access that from our EsmarConf website, which is esmarconf.github.io. As well as having these live sessions streamed to YouTube, our presenters have done a huge amount of work by recording their presentations and providing them to us in advance. And all of the individual talks are going to be published one by one on YouTube at the start of their session. That means that if you're particularly interested in one talk, you can dive straight into that pre-recording. And it means that all of those individual presentations have got verified subtitles. So if you're struggling with understanding either from a hearing perspective or from a language perspective, the individual talks have verified subtitles. So we can verify that if you want to translate them or watch them in English, the quality of those subtitles should be pretty good. If you want to engage with the conference this week or indeed anytime during the year, you can ask questions directly to our presenters and workshop coordinators by visiting the evidence synthesis hackathon Twitter feed and that's eshackathon on Twitter. And every session, every workshop and every individual talk will have its own dedicated tweet with the presenter tagged if they have a Twitter handle. So you'll be able to click on a specific tweet for a presenter and then you can engage with them by asking them questions and giving comments by clicking on the reply button and you'll be able to dive straight into a conversation with one of our presenters. So that's it for the introduction to EsmerConf. We are really thrilled and excited this year to have an amazing conference presentation lined up. So without further ado, I wanted to introduce our conference presentation keynote conference presentation this year, which is by Terry Piggott. Terry is professor at the School of Public Health and in the College of Education and Human Development at Georgia State University. She received her PhD in measurements evaluation and statistical analysis from the University of Chicago. She's the founding chair of the Aira Special Interest Group for systematic review and meta analysis. In 2016, Terry received the Frederick Mostler Award from the Campbell Collaboration and that's an award that recognizes a really important contribution to the theory, method or practice of systematic reviewing. Her research focuses on methods for meta analysis, including power, missing data and individual participant meta analyses. So Terry, let's hand over to you. We're thrilled that you could join us. Thank you so much for taking time to speak to us. And out there, we hope that you enjoy Terry's presentation. I know I'm going to. Thank you.