Intro to LLMs

Hello! I’m Daniel.

Here are my workshop and talk materials for The New York Data Science and AI Conference.

This site won’t be ready until the Conference Aug 25 - Aug 27, 2025.

Workshop: Introduction of LLMs/AI

There’s a lot of hype around AI around all their use cases and the amazing things they can do. This workshop aims to demystify how LLMs work and give you a practical understanding of how they work and how to use them beyond the desktop application.

We will code with LLMs using an API and introduce two packages, chatlas (python) and ellmer (r), that make it easier to interact with LLMs programitaclly. We’ll also see how we can use LLMs in Shiny dashboards to create a user interface with your own chat bots. We’ll then expand on these basics to learn about RAG (retrieval augmented generation) and tool calling to give our bots more context and abilities to work as “agents”. Finally, we’ll see how we can use LLMs to help us work with our data science projects.

Talk: LLMs, Chatbots, and Dashboards: Visualize Your Data with Natural Language

LLMs have a lot of hype around them these days. Let’s demystify how they work and see how we can put them in context for data science use. As data scientists, we want to make sure our results are inspectable, reliable, reproducible, and replicable. We already have many tools to help us in this front. However, LLMs provide a new challenge; we may not always be given the same results back from a query. This means trying to work out areas where LLMs excel in, and use those behaviors in our data science artifacts. This talk will introduce you to LLms, the Ellmer, and Chatlas packages for R and Python, and how they can be integrated into a Shiny to create an AI-powered dashboard. We’ll see how we can leverage the tasks LLMs are good at to better our data science products.