Sara Altman

Building Posit Assistant: An AI Agent for Data Science and Analysis

How do you build an AI agent specifically for the complex, iterative nature of data science and analysis? The Test Set podcast host Michael Chow talks to four Posit engineers about how they built Posit Assistant and what they learned in the process. Featuring: 0:00 Introduction 0:39 Simon Couch: Thinking 02:29 George Stagg: Terminal User Interface 03:31 Sara Altman: Predictive Modeling 05:14 Winston Chang: Image Data Extraction

George Stagg, Michael Chow, Sara Altman, Simon Couch, Winston Chang

Rstudio Data Science Machine Learning Python Stats Tidyverse Data Visualization Data Viz Ggplot Technology Coding Connect Server Pro Shiny RMarkdown Package Manager CRAN Interoperability Serious Data Science Dplyr Forcats Ggplot2 Tibble Readr Stringr Tidyr Purrr Github Data Wrangling Tidy Data Odbc Rayshader Plumber Blogdown Gt Lazy Evaluation Tidymodels Statistics Debugging Programming Education Rstats Open Source OSS Reticulate

Data analysis with Posit AI-assistants | Sara Altman & Simon Couch | Data Science Lab

The Data Science Lab is a live weekly call. Register at pos.it/dslab! Discord invites go out each week on lives calls. We’d love to have you! The Lab is an open, messy space for learning and asking questions. Think of it like pair coding with a friend or two. Learn something new, and share what you know to help others grow. On this call, Libby Heeren is joined by Sara Altman who walks through using Posit’s AI assistants to analyze data, including a sneak peek at Posit Assistant, and Simon Couch drops by to give us a demo of the reviewer package! Together, Sara and Simon author the Posit AI Newsletter, the best place to stay up-to-date with all the cool tools and advice on staying an informed and level-headed AI user. Hosting crew from Posit: Libby Heeren, Isabella Velasquez, Sara Altman, Simon Couch Sara’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sara-altman.bsky.social Sara’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarakaltman/ Sara’s GitHub: https://github.com/skaltman Posit AI Newsletter by Sara and Simon: https://posit.co/blog/?category=roundups Resources from the hosts and chat: Positron IDE → https://positron.posit.co/ Databot Extension → https://positron.posit.co/databot.html Getting started with Positron Assistant → https://positron.posit.co/assistant-getting-started.html Posit Assistant (Private Beta) → https://posit-ai-beta.share.connect.posit.cloud/ Reviewer Package (by Simon Couch) → https://github.com/simonpcouch/reviewer ellmer Package → https://elmer.tidyverse.org/ chatlas Package → https://github.com/posit-dev/chatlas Read the Posit AI Newsletter → https://posit.co/blog/?category=roundups Sign up to get the Posit AI Newsletter → http://pos.it/ai-news Simon’s blog post about local LLMs not quite being ready for primetime → https://posit.co/blog/local-models-are-not-there-yet/ Join the waitlist for Posit AI in RStudio → https://posit.co/products/ai/ Posit AI Known Issues & FAQs → https://posit-ai-beta.share.connect.posit.cloud/#frequently-asked-questions-faqs Blog post from Simon and Sara about Privacy and LLMs → https://posit.co/blog/trust-llm-tools/ DS Lab YouTube playlist → https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9HYL-VRX0oSeWeMEGQt0id7adYQXebhT&si=7tmU6EAJpO5S7GBh ► Subscribe to Our Channel Here: https://bit.ly/2TzgcOu Follow Us Here: Website: https://www.posit.co The Lab: https://pos.it/dslab Hangout: https://pos.it/dsh LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/posit-software Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/posit.co Thanks for learning with us! Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 07:23 “Would you mind real quick just briefly explaining the differences between Positron Assistant and Databot?” 15:01 “Is there any way to configure reasoning efforts when signing in with GitHub Copilot?” 15:49 “Does DataBot already support other providers beyond Cloud?” 20:36 “What is the cases with monetary penalty in the console output?” 22:14 “Do you happen to know if the column names of the dataset are very, very messy?” 23:18 “Can you add skills to DataBot?” 26:36 “This code isn’t being saved anywhere. So where does it go?” 27:38 “There a way to know what all the slash commands are?” 28:51 Requesting Databot to use the namespace operator 33:58 “Is there a way to search within that Databot pane?” 39:34 “Have you noticed any time differences with how quickly things run-in RStudio versus Positron?” 40:33 “What happens if you open that URL that it mentions at the bottom in your browser?” 40:50 Clarifying the difference between Posit Assistant and Positron Assistant 43:18 “What is the typical token burn rate?” 53:31 “Is this on CRAN and working in both Positron and RStudio?”

Sara Altman, Simon Couch

Deploying Scikit-learn models for in-database scoring with Snowflake and Posit Team

Modern data science workflows often face a critical challenge: how to efficiently deploy machine learning models where the data lives. Traditional approaches require moving large datasets out of the database for scoring, creating bottlenecks, security concerns, and unnecessary data movement costs. In this demo, Nick Pelikan at Posit highlights how orbital bridges the gap between Python’s rich ML ecosystem and database-native execution by converting scikit-learn pipelines to optimized SQL. This enables data scientists to: Use familiar Python tools for model development Automatically translate complex feature engineering to SQL Deploy models without rewriting code in different languages Maintain model accuracy through faithful SQL translations While this example focuses on Python, Nick also gave this demo using Orbital for R users: https://youtu.be/pnEjYNgOG9c?feature=shared Helpful resources: Follow-along blog post: https://posit.co/blog/snowflake-orbital-scikit-learn-models/ Supported models for Orbital: https://orbital.tidymodels.org/articles/supported-models.html Orbital (Python) GitHub Repo: https://github.com/posit-dev/orbital Orbital (R) GitHub Repo: https://github.com/tidymodels/orbital Databricks and Orbital for R and Python model deployment: https://posit.co/blog/databricks-orbital-r-python-model-deployment/ Emily Riederer’s XGBoost example with Orbital: https://www.emilyriederer.com/post/orbital-xgb/ Sara Altman’s blog post on Shiny + Databases: https://posit.co/blog/shiny-with-databases/ Emil’s introduction of orbital: https://emilhvitfeldt.com/talk/2024-08-13-orbital-positconf/ Nick’s Blog on Running Tidymodel Prediction Workflows with Orbital: https://posit.co/blog/running-tidymodel-prediction-workflows-inside-databases/ If you’d like to learn more about using Posit Team, you can always schedule time to chat with Posit here: https://posit.co/schedule-a-call/

Sara Altman

Shiny tidymodels Rstudio Data Science Machine Learning Python Stats Tidyverse Data Visualization Data Viz Ggplot Technology Coding Connect Server Pro Shiny RMarkdown Package Manager CRAN Interoperability Serious Data Science Dplyr Forcats Ggplot2 Tibble Readr Stringr Tidyr Purrr Github Data Wrangling Tidy Data Odbc Rayshader Plumber Blogdown Gt Lazy Evaluation Tidymodels Statistics Debugging Programming Education Rstats Open Source OSS Reticulate

Connecting Shiny Apps to Databases with Posit Team

Many of us learned to work with data on our laptop, but at work data is increasingly stored in databases. Join us on Wednesday, Dec 18th at 11am ET with Sara Altman, who will lead us through building a Shiny app that reads from and writes to a database - using DuckDB 🦆 Sara will cover how to: Set up a connection to DuckDB from a Shiny app Query the database using R or Python Use editable tables to enable users to write back to the database Securely deploy your app to Posit Connect Q&A Recording: https://youtube.com/live/C8j3d46AacM?feature=share Resources mentioned in this Q&A: Connect Authentication documentation: https://docs.posit.co/connect/user/oauth-integrations/ Git backed deployment in Posit Connect: https://posit.co/blog/git-backed-deployment-in-posit-connect/ shinylive: https://posit-dev.github.io/r-shinylive/ Mastering Shiny Best Practices: https://mastering-shiny.org/best-practices.html#best-practices Blogs: https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/duckdb-vs-dplyr-vs-base-r https://outsiderdata.netlify.app/posts/2024-04-10-the-truth-about-tidy-wrappers/benchmark_wrappers.html Using Posit tools with data in DuckDB, Databricks, and Snowflake: https://posit.co/blog/databases-with-posit/ Creating a Shiny app that interacts with a database: https://posit.co/blog/shiny-with-databases/ Appsilon has a lot of resources on the topic: https://www.appsilon.com/post/r-shiny-duckd Please note, while the monthly Posit Team Workflow Series is usually the last Wednesday of the month - this will be a week earlier. Cheers to a festive holiday season and a fantastic year ahead for you and yours! To add future Monthly Workflow Demo events to your calendar → https://www.addevent.com/event/Eg16505674 You can view all the previous workflow demos here → https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9HYL-VRX0oRsUB5AgNMQuKuHPpNDLBVt

Sara Altman