Julia Silge is a data scientist and software engineer at RStudio PBC where she works on open source tools for machine learning and MLOps. She holds a PhD in astrophysics and has worked as a data scientist in tech and the nonprofit sector, as well as a technical advisory committee member for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. She is a coauthor of Tidy Text Mining with R, Supervised Machine Learning for Text Analysis in R, and Tidy Modeling with R. An international keynote speaker and a real-world practitioner focusing on data analysis and machine learning, Julia loves text analysis, making beautiful charts, and communicating about technical topics with diverse audiences.
Max Kuhn is a software engineer at Posit (née RStudio). He is working on improving R's modeling capabilities and maintaining about 30 packages, including caret. He was a Senior Director of Nonclinical Statistics at Pfizer and had been applying models in the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries for over 18 years. Max has a Ph.D. in Biostatistics. He, and Kjell Johnson, wrote the book Applied Predictive Modeling, which won the Ziegel award from the American Statistical Association. Their second book, Feature Engineering and Selection, was published in 2019, and his book Tidy Models with R, was published in 2022.
