Location: Biosciences 4227. Emphasis will be on in-person engagement, but also option to join via Zoom.
Time: 9-10am for the lecture and overview of using LLMs for R
10:15am to 3:30pm for the interactive workshop, with breaks for lunch and afternoon tea
Cost: Free (BYO lunch)
The course is for: anyone who currently uses R, from intermittent users to experienced professionals. The workshop is not suitable for those that need an introduction to R and I’ll assume students know at least what R does and are able to do tasks like read in data and create plots.
Description: If you are using R you are probably using language models (e.g. ChatGPT) to help you write code, but are you using them in the most effective way? Language models have different biases to humans and so make different types of errors. This 1-day workshop will cover how to use language models to learn R and conduct reliable environmental analyses.
We will cover:
- Pros and cons of different tools from the simple interfaces like ChatGPT to advanced tools that can run and test code by themselves and keep going until the analysis is complete (and even written up).
- Best practice prompting techniques that can dramatically improve model performance for complex statistical applications
- Applying language models to common environmental applications such as GLMs, multivariate statistics and Bayesian statistics
- Copyright and ethical issues
We’ll finish up with a discussion of what large language models mean for analysis and the scientific process.
Requirements for interactive workshop: Laptop with R, Rstudio and VScode installed. You will also need some specialized software which can obtained for free.
About Chris
I’m an Associate Professor of Fisheries Science at University of Tasmania and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. I specialise in data analysis and modelling, skills I use to better inform environmental decision makers. R takes me many places and I’ve worked with marine ecosystems from tuna fisheries to mangrove forests. I’m an experienced teacher of R. I have taught R to 100s people over the years, from the basics to sophisticated modelling and for everyone from undergraduates to my own supervisors.