Resources

How to build an AI conference assistant with four lines of code? 💡

Navigating conferences with hundreds of interesting presentations and great presenters can require a significant amount of scrolling and clicking. I realized that it’s possible to build an AI conference assistant with only a few lines of natural-language instructions and one PDF. Try my SREE 2025 conference assistant here. I created a custom GPT with a ChatGPT Plus account (20 USD/month) and SREE’s 2025 program PDF. To replicate this chat, open your ChatGPT account, click on “Explore GPTs” in the left panel, then “+ Create” in the upper right corner, uploaded the PDF, and add a few instructions (see image below). A few remarks:

• Although the PDF is publicly available, standard ChatGPT does not access it or use it in this way.

• I had to include specific instructions to distinguish presenters from non-presenting authors.

• My instructions may occasionally misidentify presenters and non-presenters (see “instructions”), which could be easily solved if the organizers uploaded an Excel sheet identifying presenters.

• With additional information (a few excel files), this chat could:

  1. Address questions using abstracts, papers, and other material.
  2. Help researchers to find who is using specific data or methods.
  3. Store chats from previous conferences to explore how the conference evolves over time.
  4. Easily follow conference grant awardees over time.

This is how simple it is to set this up 👇:

Data Visualization using R

As an R enthusiast, I am always amazed by the many possibilities for visualizing data with R. Below is one of the main figures from my Job Market Paper, which shows how difficult it was to fulfill the agreement of the teacher service program I study.

Below is a table of my favorite (free!) sources for exploring, visualizing, and interacting with data in R.