Automation

LLMs for Data Science

[2025 - Day 1 - Data Science & Algos] Hadley Wickham shares insights from practical applications of LLMs in data science, exploring three key areas where these tools prove genuinely useful beyond the hype: writing code, writing prose, and rectangling non-rectangular data. For data scientists working with text, images, videos, or audio data, this talk offers valuable perspectives on leveraging LLMs effectively for real workflows and transforming fundamentally unstructured information.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Hadley Wickham, Chief Scientist, Posit

tidymodels: Adventures in Rewriting a Modeling Pipeline - posit::conf(2023)

Presented by Ryan Timpe

An overview of the benefits unlocked on our data science team by adopting tidymodels.

Data science sure has changed over the past few years! Everyone’s talking about production. RStudio is now Posit. Models are now tidy.

This talk is about embracing that change and updating existing models using the tidymodels framework. I recently completed this change, letting go of our in-production code and revisioning it with tidymodels. My team ended up with a faster, more scalable pipeline that enabled us to better automate our workflow and increase our scale while improving our stakeholders’ experiences.

I’ll share tips and tricks for adopting the tidymodels framework in existing products, best practices for learning and upskilling teams, and advice for using tidymodel packages to build more accessible data science tools.

Democratizing Access to Education Data - posit::conf(2023)

Presented by Erika Tyagi

Learn how the Urban Institute is making high-quality data more accessible through the Education Data Portal.

Every year, government agencies release large amounts of data on schools and colleges, but this information is scattered across various websites and is often difficult to use. To make these data more accessible, the Urban Institute built the Education Data Portal, a freely available one-stop shop for harmonized data and metadata for nearly all major federal education datasets. In this talk, we’ll demonstrate how the portal works and share lessons we’ve learned about making data accessible to users with varying technical skills and preferred programming languages.

Megan Beckett | Aesthetically automated figure production | RStudio

Automation, reproducibility, data driven. These are not normally concepts one would associate with the traditional publishing industry, where designers normally manually produce every artefact in proprietary software. And, when you have 1000s of figures to produce and update for a single textbook, this becomes an insurmountable task, meaning our textbooks quickly become outdated, especially in our rapidly advancing world.

With R and the tidyverse in our back pocket, we rose to the challenge to revolutionize this workflow. I will explain how we collaborated with a publishing group to develop a system to aesthetically automate the production of figures for a textbook including translations into several languages.

I think you’ll find this talk interesting as it shows how we applied tools that are familiar to us, but in an unconventional way to fundamentally transform a conventional process.