program.qmd

---
title: "R+AI 2026 Program"
---

## Day 1: Tuesday, November 10, 2026

All times Eastern

| Start Time | End Time | Duration | Title of Talk | Speaker and Title (affiliation) |
|------------|----------|----------|---------------|----------------------------------|
| 8:00 AM | 8:45 AM | 45 mins | [Opening Keynote: Friction Worth Keeping: What Keeps Us Human When AI Makes Everything Easy](Abstracts.qmd#andrew-heiss) | Andrew Heiss, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of International Politics and Policy, Georgetown University in Qatar |
| 8:50 AM | 9:25 AM | 35 mins | [From Statistical Models to Generative AI: Why Statistical Thinking Still Matters in the R+AI Era](Abstracts.qmd#sahana-prasad) | Sahana Prasad, Guest Faculty, BITS-WILP, Pilani (India); Sharanya Prasad, Senior Product Manager, Amazon Web Services |
| 9:30 AM | 9:45 AM | 15 mins | [Lightning talk: To prompt or not to prompt? Why agentic AI is not the panacea.](Abstracts.qmd#diana-pholo) | Diana Pholo, Machine Learning Data Scientist (Research) |
| 10:05 AM | 10:40 AM | 35 mins | [50 lines of code to rebuild Claude Code in R](Abstracts.qmd#joseph-barbier) | Joseph Barbier, Yellow Sunflower |
| 10:45 AM | 11:20 AM | 35 mins | [From Prompts to Pipelines: Building Auditable Human–AI Workflows for Evidence Synthesis in R](Abstracts.qmd#maciej-cabanski) | Maciej Cabanski, Data Analysis and R Specialist |
| 12:05 PM | 12:40 PM | 35 mins | [Turtles All the Way Down: Recursive Language Models in R](Abstracts.qmd#troy-hernandez) | Troy Hernandez, Founder and CEO, cornball.ai |
| 12:45 PM | 1:20 PM | 35 mins | [Self-Documenting Shiny Applications with GitHub Actions, ChatGPT, and Playwright MCP](Abstracts.qmd#ashley-geldmeier) | Ashley Geldmeier, Data Scientist I, ACES |
| 1:25 PM | 1:40 PM | 15 mins | [Lightning talk: Ten Agents, 8GB of RAM, and Ten Dollars a Month](Abstracts.qmd#kerrigan-baron) | Kerrigan Baron, CTO & Co-Founder, Fidget Labs B.V. |
| 1:45 PM | 2:20 PM | 35 mins | [Agentic Compactness: Measuring the Cost of Machine Learning Workflows in R](Abstracts.qmd#imad-el-badisy) | Imad El Badisy, Research Engineer in Biostatistics, Mohammed VI Center for Research and Innovation (CM6RI) |
| 3:00 PM | 3:35 PM | 35 mins | [Utilizing Reproducible Agents in RStudio - A Researcher's Toolkit](Abstracts.qmd#nykko-vitali) | Nykko Vitali, PhD Student, Department of Psychology, Harvard University |
| 3:40 PM | 4:40 PM | 1 hour | [Workshop: Where Does AI Fit in R Package Risk-Based Assessment?: A Working Session Toward a Community Whitepaper](workshops.qmd#where-does-ai-fit) | Ileana Saenz, R Validation Hub Working Group; Strategic Platform Lead for Life Sciences at Appsilon; Doug Kelkhoff, Chair, R Validation Hub; Product Lead, Life Sciences, Domino Data Lab |

## Day 2: Wednesday, November 11, 2026

All times Eastern

| Start Time | End Time | Duration | Title of Talk | Speaker and Title (affiliation) |
|------------|----------|----------|---------------|----------------------------------|
| 8:00 AM | 8:35 AM | 35 mins | [Enterprise AI Governance and Secure Grounding: Privacy, Zero Trust, and Observability in Agentic AI Systems](Abstracts.qmd#karthik-chandrasekaran) | Karthik Chandrasekaran, Principal Engineering Manager, Microsoft |
| 8:40 AM | 9:15 AM | 35 mins | [R-Native Private AI for Sensitive Data: Secure Analysis and Code Modernization](Abstracts.qmd#lovekumar-patel) | Lovekumar Patel, Delivery Manager, Data & AI Solutions, ProCogia; Andey Nunes-Brewster, Data Interoperability Coordinator, Oregon Health Authority |
| 9:20 AM | 9:55 AM | 35 mins | [SurvSure: Building an Evidence-Grounded, Verified AI Copilot for Survival Analysis in R Shiny](Abstracts.qmd#zahra-esfandiar) | Zahra Esfandiar, Strategic Analysis Specialist, Saman Electronic Payment (SEP) |
| 10:15 AM | 10:30 AM | 15 mins | [Lightning talk: Standardizing Molecular Diagnostic Metadata: An Automated Workflow Mapping FDA-Cleared NAAT Assays to Pathogen Taxonomy](Abstracts.qmd#manuel-duval) | Manuel Duval, Scientist, double-strand LLC |
| 10:35 AM | 11:10 AM | 35 mins | [Two Languages, One Conversation: An LLM-Powered R Shiny App served by a Python API](Abstracts.qmd#michael-thomas) | Michael Thomas, Chief Data Scientist, Ketchbrook Analytics |
| 11:55 AM | 12:30 PM | 35 mins | [anvl - Accelerated array computing for R](Abstracts.qmd#sebastian-fischer) | Sebastian Fischer, PhD Student, LMU Munich, Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) |
| 12:35 PM | 1:35 PM | 1 hour | [Tutorial: From Lab to Production: Shipping R-Powered Drug Discovery Models as Apps on an Enterprise AI/Data Platform](workshops.qmd#from-lab-to-production) | Chanin Nantasenamat, PhD, Lead Developer Advocate, Snowflake |
| 1:55 PM | 2:30 PM | 35 mins | [Keep your R workflow in the big AI picture](Abstracts.qmd#marcin-dubel) | Marcin Dubel, Head of Technology, Appsilon |
| 2:35 PM | 3:10 PM | 35 mins | [From Experimentation to Trusted Production: A Practical Framework for R+AI in Regulated Industries](Abstracts.qmd#nammn-joshii) | Nammn Joshii, Director, AI Innovation and Delivery, ProCogia |
| 3:15 PM | 4:00 PM | 45 mins | [Closing Keynote: Beyond the prompt](Abstracts.qmd#mine-cetinkaya-rundel) | Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Professor of the Practice, Department of Statistical Science, Duke University; Senior Developer Advocate, Posit, PBC |