Join our workshop on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) in R with ragnar, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 

Here’s some more info: 

Title: RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) in R with ragnar

Date: Thursday, September 11th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)

Speaker: Sharon Machlis is a long-time tech journalist and former director of editorial data & analytics for media company Foundry (Computerworld, InfoWorld, and others), now (mostly) retired. She is the author of “Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism” (CRC Press) and was the host of InfoWorld’s “Do More With R” video series. She has presented at a number of conferences including the European R User Meeting and Investigative Reporters & Editors’ computer-assisted reporting conference, and she’s slated to give a lightning talk at posit::conf(2025).

Description: Would you like to ask an LLM questions about a specific collection of documents? One of the most popular techniques for doing this is RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). And now RAG has come to the R tidyverse.

In this workshop you’ll learn how to use the ragnar and ellmer packages to process documents, retrieve portions of those docs that are most relevant to a query, and send that data to an LLM to generate a response.

We’ll start by going through the InfoWorld article How to Create Your Own RAG Application in R demo, which analyzes Workshop for Ukraine information to answer natural-language questions like “What workshops will help me improve my R data visualization skills?”

We’ll then apply what we’ve learned to a new data set: posit::conf(2025) conference sessions, so you can answer questions like “Are there any generative AI sessions happening on Thursday morning?”

This is a hands-on workshop demonstrating code. If you want to follow along, it will help to have a basic understanding of R and R functions. 

Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)

Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration

How can I register?

• Go to https://bit.ly/3wvwMA6 or https://bit.ly/4aD5LMC  or  https://bit.ly/3PFxtNA and donate at least 20 euro. Feel free to donate more if you can, all proceeds go directly to support Ukraine.

• Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

• Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.

How can I sponsor a student?

• Go to https://bit.ly/3wvwMA6 or https://bit.ly/4aD5LMC  or https://bit.ly/3PFxtNA and donate at least 20 euro (or 17 GBP or 20 USD or 800 UAH). Feel free to donate more if you can, all proceeds go to support Ukraine!

• Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

• Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.

If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).

You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.

Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!