Harnessing R Packages for Modern Artificial Intelligence

🎉 Event Announcement: UNILORIN R Users Group Meetup Series
📌 Event Theme: Harnessing R Packages for Modern Artificial Intelligence
📅 Date: Saturday, November 16, 2025
⏰ Time: 5:00 PM WAT
📍 Venue: Zoom

The R ecosystem has rapidly expanded with innovative packages that bring modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into R workflows. These tools enable R users to interact seamlessly with AI models, integrate contextual insights from their R sessions, and even embed intelligent assistants within their development environments.

For instance, ellmer provides a unified interface to interact with LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude, supporting streaming, asynchronous operations, tool invocation, and structured outputs. Similarly, gander (developed by Simon Couch at Posit) introduces a Copilot-like assistant into RStudio or Positron that automatically understands your code and environment to offer relevant AI support.

🔍 Audience Takeaways
Participants will gain hands-on understanding and practical skills for integrating AI tools into R. Key learning points include:

• LLM Integration in R: Learn how to call and control large language models using ellmer, and how to supply them with session-aware context via tools like btw and mcptools.
• AI-Assisted Coding Workflows: Explore helpers such as chores, gander, buggy, and ensure to automate refactoring, documentation, test generation, and debugging through AI.
• Data Analysis with AI: Discover how to leverage LLMs for data-centric tasks such as model evaluation (vitals), retrieval-augmented generation (ragnar), and text processing on data frames (mall).
• Exploring Specialised Tools: Get exposed to advanced packages like kuzco (for LLM-based computer vision) and shinychat (for chatbot integration in Shiny apps), broadening your view of AI applications beyond text.
• Practical Insights: Understand when and why to use each package, with discussions around performance, cost, and best-fit scenarios.

Expected Outcome
By the end of this workshop, participants will have a clear understanding of how R’s emerging AI ecosystem can enhance their data science workflows. They will gain a mental map of the most impactful AI-enabled packages, empowering them to write smarter code, debug efficiently, generate insights faster, and build AI-driven R applications with confidence.