EPC 2026 Pre-Conference Event Registration. "Beyond the Chatbox: LLM Coding and Research Agents for Academics"

Please fill out the below registration form to sign up for the EPC 2025 pre-conference tutorial/workshop "Beyond the Chatbox: LLM Coding and Research Agents for Academics" on Wednesday, 3 June 2026, 13:30–16:30) at Complesso Belmeloro, room "Lab O" (Via Beniamino Andreatta, 8, 40126 Bologna, Italy).

About

This interactive tutorial and workshop provides a practical introduction to using large language models (LLMs) in coding agents, featuring applied examples in population research. The session focuses on how to go beyond the simple back-and-forth with an LLM from popular providers, and instead use LLM coding agents to improve your productivity, augment your skills in computational reproducibility and code quality, track versions with Git, and automate research tasks.

© Image generated by Google Gemini | Nanobanana

The software industry has been enjoying these benefits for over a year now, with even top software engineers now having AI assistants generate a vast majority of their code. Now, the tools for agentic coding are mature enough for anyone to master.

Unlike many educational materials in this field, this workshop will also address the new vectors of attack that novice users might expose themselves to by using coding agents blindly. We will cover key security risks associated with agentic systems, including data leakage, unsafe code execution, and unintended modifications to analysis code and research materials. To mitigate these risks, we will introduce accessible strategies such as containerization, sandboxing, and workflow isolation.

Participants will also see how the agents themselves can assist in setting up and using these protective tools to improve transparency and reproducibility. The workshop will combine short demonstrations with applied examples relevant to population research. Participants are encouraged to bring their own projects or ideas, which we will use to explore how LLM agents can be integrated into real research workflows. For those without a project, guided exercises and example tasks will be provided.

Target Audience & Prerequisites
This session is designed as a hands-on learning environment for researchers at all levels of technical experience who want to use LLM agents more effectively, safely, and transparently in their work.

No prior experience is required, though some familiarity with LLM chat interfaces and capabilities is welcome.
Registered participants will receive an introductory email with instructions two weeks before the workshop. This email will include recommendations on which services to use during the session.

Participants should bring their own laptop to participate if they want to try things that we show and discuss. Participants will also be expected to sign up for a free trial or use their own existing subscription to one of the available LLM inference providers.

Registration
Participation is free, but places are limited to 30 and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. In case of questions, please feel free to reach out to Egor Kotov at kotov@demogr.mpg.de.

Oranizers

Egor Kotov (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) is a human mobility researcher and R package developer. With many years of pre-LLM experience using R, he now integrates coding agents as a core part of his everyday work. He has previously organized several workshops on reproducible open human mobility data analysis (1, 2) and general computational reproducibility topics (3, 4).