If you are going to the Joint Statistical Meetings this year, mark your calendar for the one day short course on “Generalized additive models and their extensions: the penalized regression spline” sponsored by the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences, and taught by Simon N Wood, University of Bath, UK.
The course is designed for statisticians and experimenters who need methods for analyzing generalized additive models, as a tool to analyze a variety of complex models, including models that fit under the framework of quadratically penalized GLMs. The practical use of these methods are illustrated with a variety of examples using the mgcv package in R (Dr Wood is the author of this R recommended package). Participants should preferably bring a laptop, with the latest version of R installed. The course material will be based on the book: Generalized Additive Models: An introduction with R, 2006, S. N. Wood.
For more information, see the JSM2012 On-line Program in the following link. Hope to see you in San Diego!