About Me
I am newly retired and eagerly exploring my next chapter! You can follow along in this journey at My Next Chapter blog.
Previously, I was a journalist and data professional equally at home analyzing data, coding tools for journalists, and covering technology. My most recent paid job was director of editorial data & analytics at Foundry (an IDG Inc. company), which publishes tech Web sites including Computerworld, CIO, PCWorld, and Macworld; and author of InfoWorld's Do More With R series .
My book, Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism, is available from publisher CRC Press and Amazon (you can see Six chapters free online).
I've taught workshops at ProPublica, and Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences and keynoted the 2020 European R User Meeting.
I received an ASBPE national gold award for impact/investigative online excellence (see story) and two ASBPE national golds for best how-to article (see 2014 and 2017 winners) I was also named the Digital Analytics Association's top practitioner in 2021 for work analyzing data at my job and in my community I was also winner of a 2023 Neal Award for best instructional content.
I hold an Extra-class ham radio license and was honored by the Association of Radio Amateurs of Bosnia & Herzegovina "for extraordinary contribution to transmitting humanitarian messages of the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina" during the 1992-95 war.
My other hobbies include photography, travel, hiking, snowshoeing, crocheting, and classical piano. And, I'm somewhat obsessed with both generative AI and the R programming language.
You can follow me on Mastodon at @smach@masto.machlis.com and my searchable app with my Mastodon posts, as well as on LinkedIn.
My Recent InfoWorld and Computerworld Articles
Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE 2024-06-24
5 easy ways to run an LLM locally 2024-03-28
How to run R in Visual Studio Code 2024-02-15
Posit lays off R Markdown, knitr creator Yihui Xie 2024-01-05
8 ChatGPT tools for R programming 2023-12-21
Anthropic's Claude 2.1 LLM turbocharges performance, offers beta tool use 2023-11-21
My Data-Related Mastodon Posts
“Nvidia quietly released a new open-sourced, fine-tuned LLM called Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, which is outperforming industry leaders like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on key benchmarks. . . . Nemotron is showing that smaller, efficient models can compete with giants.” - Rowan Cheung, The AI Rundown newsletter
Good news both for open-source advocates and those concerned about all the power LLMs are using.
https://www.therundown.ai/p/open-source-ai-takes-the-lead
On Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct
#GenAI #LLM #LLMs (2024-10-17 13:42:50) >>
"Fantasy Football Analytics: Statistics, Prediction, and Empiricism Using R" - free online textbook in progress by Isaac T. Petersen, associate professor at the University of Iowa
https://isaactpetersen.github.io/Fantasy-Football-Analytics-Textbook/
#RStats #R #SportsAnalytics @rstats (2024-10-16 21:31:43) >>
If you're on LinkedIn, Philipp Schmid, technical lead at Hugging Face, has a writeup of Swarm's main points, explaining: “Swarm provides a stateless abstraction to manage interactions and handoffs between multiple agents and does not use the Assistants API. 👀” But there's lots more at
#GenAI #OpenAI (2024-10-14 13:58:56) >>
OpenAI quietly released Swarm, an open-source framework for orchestrating generative AI agents that it calls “educational” and “experimental”. That means: no support, no response to issues and pull requests, don't use in production. But it's real open source, under the MIT License.
https://github.com/openai/swarm
#GenAI #OpenAI #LLMs (2024-10-14 13:50:44) >>