Guest Lecture

James Balamuta

Topic: Shiny Without Boundaries: One App, Multiple Destinations

This lecture tackles the challenge of deploying Shiny applications across multiple environments. We’ll explore deployment pathways including cloud services, Docker containers, on-premise servers, Electron desktop applications, WebAssembly browser solutions, and Quarto integration. You’ll learn practical implementation strategies and key trade-offs for each approach, enabling you to deploy a single Shiny application virtually anywhere—reaching users where they are while maintaining full functionality.

Bio: James is the founder and principal of HJJB, LLC, which offers specialized data science guidance and solutions to startups, Fortune 500 companies, and academia across the U.S. He was an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University for the 2024 Autumn Quarter. Previously, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where his research focused on latent variable estimation under restricted latent class models and computational statistics.

He holds a Ph.D. in Informatics from UIUC. For his work, he was awarded the 2022 Psychometric Society Dissertation Prize and was a co-recipient of the 2021 Bradley Hanson Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement. During his graduate studies, he contributed significantly to Department of Statistics' education initiatives in data science and earned accolades, including the Department of Statistics Doctoral Student Teaching Award in 2019. His multifaceted career reflects a commitment to advancing research, education, and practical applications in data science.

Schedule: The lecture will take place Wednesday, April 9, at 6pm Central, and will be accessible via a Zoom link emailed to students in STAT 447. A recording may be made available afterwards (TBD).