Programming café: Hands-on with scientific use of LLMs in Python and R

Do you want to meet other programmers at Utrecht University, improve your programming skills, or ask questions related to programming? Pick up your laptop and come to the Programming Café! 

During this informal meet-up we will share knowledge about programming through short presentations, work on programming projects, and help each other with challenges in working with code and data. 

What to expect 

During the Programming Café, you can work on your own project and share knowledge in a community setting. You are also welcome to bring programming questions, bugs, and problems to discuss and resolve with members of RDM Support and others attending the café.  

Each Programming Café consists of 2 parts of 1 hour.

The first hour will feature a special theme. This is typically a short presentation or demonstration of (maximum) one hour. We will start the presentation at around 15:00.

The second hour is "Social coding": from 16:00 onwards you can work on your project or ask questions. Soft drinks and snacks will be provided!

You are warmly invited for both, but joining the either the first or the second hour is also fine!

Topic: Hands-on LLM with scientific use of LLMs in Python and R (Prompt Engineering  and Structured Outputs)

Speaker: dr. Qixiang Fang (UU, ODISSEI Social Data Science team)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, but getting reliable, structured, and reproducible results requires more than just trying out a few prompts. In this hands-on Programming Café session, we’ll explore practical LLM prompt engineering techniques and output structuring using the ellmer package in R (or langchain in Python if you prefer). You’ll learn:

How to design prompts that produce accurate, stable, and predictable outputs.
How to request and validate structured (JSON) output. 

We’ll focus on concrete, minimal examples that you can immediately reuse in your own data analysis pipelines.

No prior LLM experience required, just basic programming knowledge.
 

Who can attend

Everyone is welcome at the Programming Café! You can be of any skill level and at any stage in working with your code and data. We expect most attendees will be R or Python users, but users of other programming languages and software are invited as well.