Talks and workshops
Almost everyone in the room already uses AI. Few use it well. Our talks show what the few do differently, live, on real data.
We speak to analysts, researchers and scientists, and to the people who commission their work. Most sessions are live: the audience calls the shots and an AI agent does the implementation, so you see it work, and see where it needs a person.
Coming up
Data visualisation with AI agents: you design, the agent builds
Tuesday 10 November 2026, 17:30–19:30. The Data Lab Community, Bayes Centre, Edinburgh.
A live, audience-led session. You choose the data and make the design calls, and the agent writes the code. No coding needed.
What you take away: the difference between a chatbot and an agent, and why a chart described once can be built in R, Python or JavaScript.
Event page and registration, The Data Lab Community
Past talks
Grammar of graphics meets agentic AI
29 September 2026. VisHub, Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh. An internal session for the lab's information-visualisation researchers; the materials are public.
The room chose the data (TidyTuesday's episodes of The Office) and made every design decision; an AI agent wrote and re-ran the code after each one.
The takeaway: once a chart is described as a grammar (data, mappings, layers), any capable agent can build it, in R or Python. The analyst's job moves from typing code to making the design calls.
Slides · The session's workbook
Artificial intelligence: from hype and fear to hope and possibility
May 2026. Edinburgh Humanists. Given by Jon before the company was founded.
The takeaway: the public argument has been about whether AI works, when the useful question is which AI works, who is building it, and what cheap cognition does to work built around expensive expertise.
Free to reuse
Our agentic data visualisation workshop materials are public: set-up, a facilitator's guide and worked sessions, for anyone who wants to run one themselves.
Ask us to speak
We give talks of 20 to 45 minutes, live demonstrations where the room decides what happens, and hands-on masterclasses. Every session ends with something the audience can use the next morning.