The Future is Shiny

Track: Shiny for Good

Sustainable open source starts with sustainable leadership, and has far reaching impacts for healthy communities and code. Open source maintainers and leaders are struggling with the shared challenge of how to work sustainably, while at the same time fostering a welcoming and inclusive community.

As code becomes a smaller part of the role, it turns into project management, conflict resolution, decision making in uncertain situations, building an inclusive community, and lots and lots of communication. This is not something each leader and maintainer needs to figure out how to do on their own. We can share our approaches, what works and what doesn't work, and connect with each other.

Whether you’re just starting a project, interested in getting involved in open source, or already have a community of thousands, there are some tips, approaches and templates you can use to make maintaining an open source project more manageable. In this talk you’ll learn some key practices for effective open source project leadership.

You’ll walk away with new approaches for making project decisions, strategies to manage user and contributor interactions, and better ways to set boundaries that are right for you and your project's needs. There are tools that can help you navigate your path more easily, and a journey that we can go on together, to help you survive and thrive as an open source leader!

Dr. Tracy K. Teal has been the Open Source Program Director at RStudio/Posit, Executive Director of Dryad, and a co-founder and Executive Director of The Carpentries. She developed open source bioinformatics software as an assistant professor at Michigan State University and holds a PhD in computation and neural systems from California Institute of Technology.

Tracy is involved in the open source software and reproducible research communities, including serving on advisory committees for NumFOCUS, pyOpenSci, R Consortium, and CarbonPlan, and has been working with open source communities, developing curriculum, and teaching people how to work with data and code as a developer, instructor and project leader throughout her career.

Track: Shiny in Life Sciences

A fundamental principle of the scientific method is peer review and independent verification of findings. Good science depends on scientific transparency and reproducibility. For this reason, researchers are increasingly including their data and code as part of publication.

Nevertheless, scientific findings are not always reproducible. A recent large-scale study of publicly available research code showed that 74% failed to execute without errors.One reason research code may not be reproducible is differing computational environments. A potential solution to this problem lies in WebAssembly.

In this talk I'll introduce WebAssembly, webR, and Shinylive, showing how statistical software and its dependencies can be pinned to specific versions and self-contained as a universal binary package. This ensures reproducibility on any machine with a modern web browser and, in the future, could provide a new way for researchers to share results with the community.

George is a Software Engineer working on the webR project as part of the Open Source Team at Posit Software PBC. A former academic, George also has experience with teaching and research in computational mathematics and statistics. When not working with software, George enjoys digital photography, fantasy & sci-fi, and tinkering with electronic synthesisers.

Shiny just turned 10 years not long ago. What can we learn from that journey? Let's delve into the lessons learned and its promising path ahead.Join me for an insightful exploration into the future of Shiny and how recent improvements, such as integrations with Quarto and WebR, along with the launch of Shiny for Python, illuminate a vibrant trajectory.

Lets look into how Shiny's role in pharma and life sciences is expanding, playing a pivotal part in transforming data communication and decision-making in these critical domains.We'll also examine how Shiny and software development can go hand in hand, paving the way for better and more user-friendly applications. Learn how Shiny's evolution aligns with the demands of modern development practices, ensuring that it remains a versatile and indispensable tool for creating impactful data-driven experiences.

The future is undeniably Shiny, and this talk promises to be a forward-looking journey into the next decade of its empowering legacy.

Track: Shiny in Enterprise

Shiny's role in data science spans across industries, offering robust solutions that drive decision-making and innovation. My journey with Shiny over the past decade, particularly within the entertainment industry, has revealed its extraordinary potential to tackle a wide array of challenges.

This sector's unique demands actually provide lessons of broad applicability.In this keynote, I will share insights from deploying Shiny across three enterprises focused on entertainment: firms specializing in measurement and consulting for movie and TV studios, and a leading movie and television studio.
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We'll explore:
- Versatile Analytical Applications: How Shiny's flexibility supports diverse analytical needs, making it an invaluable tool for data-driven insights in any sector.
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- Empowerment and Scalability: Discussing Shiny's accessibility for data scientists at all levels, while offering the robustness needed for enterprise-level applications.
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- Cross-Industry Lessons from Entertainment: The presentation aims to underscore that the learnings from the entertainment industry, with its rich data and dynamic requirements, are universally valuable.

Join me for a somewhat personal journey through the evolution of Shiny in data science, discovering how the challenges of entertainment analytics can inspire solutions with wide-ranging applicability and impact. 

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Eric Kostello is an Executive Director of Data Science at Warner Brothers Discovery, currently focused on content production. In a previous role he was a co-creator of a product that quantified the experience of viewing entertainment content, transitioning from a single survey to an always-on, continuously updating survey of the top 1000 TV shows.

Eric has a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA and simultaneous BAs in Physics and Sociology from UC Berkeley. He is a coauthor of a forthcoming book on data science leadership.