My time at Posit::Conf 2023 in Chicago
I had the opportunity to attend posit::conf 2023 in Chicago after applying for the Opportunity scholarship which is funding provided to individuals worldwide who are members of an underrepresented group so they can attend. These groups include people of color, those with disabilities, elders/older adults, LGBTQ folks, and women/minority genders.
There were 40 scholarship opportunities in 2023 and 20 previously. Opportunity Scholarships include conference registration, a room at the conference hotel, choice of an in-person workshop, travel support in the form of reimbursement for flight/train/bus/cab, and incidentals. I flew 23 hours in total to Chicago from Gaborone, Botswana and used a cab to get to the hotel and a train back to the airport after the conference which costed only $3.
In the beginning, there was rstudio::conf
Posit::conf is a gathering where the data science community can engage in workshops, conference keynotes, and talks for two or more days. Participants can connect with peers, learn from experts, and expand their skills. Registration is necessary for livestreams, recordings, and networking.
The very first conference posit had was rstudio::conf which took place January 13th and 14th, 2017 in Orlando Florida. The subsequent years followed rstudio::2018 in San Diego, rstudio::2019 in Austin, Texas and rstudio::2020 in San Francisco. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic safety restrictions forced everyone to meetup online turning rstudio::global 2021 into a virtual meetup with participants from around the world. That year, a member of R-Ladies Nairobi, Shelmith Kariuki, gave a talk about the rKenyaCensus package that contains the 2019 Kenya Population Census which was carried out in August 2019. After the COVID-19 safety restrictions had been lifted, rstudio::conf 2022 was in person in Washington DC.
Posit::conf 2023 was the first conference with the name change in Chicago from the 17th to 20th September. The event offered Birds of a Feather sessions for collaborations and took place at the Hyatt Regency Chicago which accommodated most of the participants with a few others staying in nearby hotels.
Workshops
The conference schedule had a two day workshop at the start of the conference and two days of conference keynotes and talks. Before attending, registering a workshop had to be made from a list of workshops, https://posit-conf-2023.github.io/workshops/.
Day 1
I attended It’s Not Just Code: Managing an Open Source Project instructed by Tracy Teal, TidyTuesday organiser on day 1 and the Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Python on day 2 because of my interest in getting back into research in Machine and Deep learning.
I choose this workshop because at the time, I was working on the R-Ladies Gaborone website and wanted my chapter members to participate in the development of the website. I learnt a lot about reprex, reproducible examples found on project templates and managing realistic expectations especially from different project members.
Day 2
Before attending the other workshop on day 2, we had to install Miniforge for installing and running Python code. The experience was different because the instructor posted instruction assuming that everyone used Miniforge and had Mac computers, I use Windows OS. With some help from Isabel Zimmerman 💜, I managed to setup my machine and was ready for the workshop. The workshop consisted of Data Processing, Evaluating & tuning machine learning classifiers, using PyTorch, Finetuning Large Language Models and Training deep neural networks.
Talks
One of the keynote talks that was impressive was R Not only in Production presented by Kara Woo. She shared what her team had learnt from successfully integrating R in all areas of their company’s operations. InsightRX is a precision medicine company whose goal is to ensure that each patient receives the right drug at the optimal dose. At InsightRX, R is a first-class language that’s used for purposes ranging from customer-facing products to internal data infrastructure, new product prototypes, and regulatory reporting. Using R in this way has given them the opportunity to forge fruitful collaborations with other teams in which they can both learn and teach.
There were a load of talks with one of them being the Github Copilot integration with Rstudio demonstration with Tom Mock. This feature automatically automatically fills a code statement. The following link shows a links to all the keynotes and talks held at the conference, https://posit.co/blog/keynotes-and-talks-at-posit-conf-2023/.
Another talk that was interesting to me was R-Ladies Global team co-lead, Riva Quiroga’s talk on Sustainable growth of global communities: RLadies’ next ten years where she talked about how they are planning the development of R-Ladies for the next ten years. The talk focused on the sustainable management of an ever-growing community. She presented the organisation’s most recent efforts at documenting workflows, making data-driven decisions, and automating tasks that allow volunteers to focus their time where it is most needed.
Conference Communication
Over 100 attendees from different R communities were together in one space. The conference used Discord where all attendees had to sign up for an account and participate in the channels created in the app. The app was a cool way to find out what everyone was going to do later that day and planned functions by the companies in attendance. The app was active until a few days after the conference.
Awesome R-Ladies
On the last day of the conference, R-Ladies Chicago and R-Ladies Global co-hosted an R-Ladies meetup at the conclusion of the conference. This was a chance to meet in-person all the other R-Ladies Chapters and people who I had communicated with on the Slack channel.
In attendance was the R Ladies global team, some of the R-Ladies chapters and participants from the conference. The meetup started with announcements from the global team and R-Ladies chapter member testimonials of their experiences. Then, a Q & A session was also done with the rest of the undiscussed questions posted the their website.
I definitely recommend attending posit::conf to meet with tech innovators and make connections with like-minded Data Scientists and enthusiast. Not everybody you will meet will know the same thing as you do and you may find yourself contributing in some way to their projects. The next posit::conf 2024 will be held from 12th — 14th August in Seattle, Washington. If you think you can’t afford it, apply for the opportunity scholarship like I did and you will find yourself flying off to meet the R and Python community.
