Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

I&F Decision Science Assoc. Manager @ Accenture | Applied Scientific Researcher

Personal daily events

2024

Closing a Chapter at CODELCO

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Last days at CODELCO. More than two years here and it’s hard to summarize everything. The projects delivered, the processes optimized, but honestly what I’ll remember most are the people. Engineers, operators, geologists – everyone taught me something. I came in as a data scientist and I’m leaving as someone who actually understands how a mine works – the gap between what a model says and what an operator needs is enormous, and bridging that gap became my real job. I learned that the best algorithm in the world is useless if the guy running the plant at 3 AM doesn’t trust it. I learned how flotation actually works, why grind size matters, what metallurgists worry about. The people are what made it, though. The engineers who stayed late explaining processes, the operators who patiently showed me what the numbers actually meant on the ground. Grateful for the experience. Time to move on to new challenges, but this chapter will stay with me.

2023

HIDSAG is Out

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The HIDSAG paper was finally published in Scientific Data (Nature). Read the paper. I keep opening the page just to see it there. All those hours in the lab acquiring hyperspectral images, carefully organizing and labeling mineral samples, writing documentation so others could actually use the dataset – it all paid off. It feels great to contribute something to the open data community. If someone somewhere uses this dataset to push their research forward, that’s the best outcome I could ask for.

2022

A Good Day in Flotation

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Today the optimization model showed its first significant results in the flotation circuit. I can’t even explain the feeling. Months of data cleaning, feature engineering, model tuning, endless meetings with operators – and then suddenly the numbers move in the right direction. Seeing your model actually improve a real industrial process, not just a metric on a Jupyter notebook, is something else entirely. The operators were surprised. I was surprised. A genuinely good day.

First Weeks at CODELCO

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Started at CODELCO and the scale of everything here is hard to describe. This is the national copper corporation – the biggest copper producer in the world – and you feel it the moment you step on site. Nothing in my university lab prepared me for processes that run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The challenge now is optimizing something that never stops. You can’t just pause a concentrator plant to test a hypothesis. The security protocols alone took me by surprise – badges, safety inductions, restricted areas. This is a state-owned company and they take it seriously. Going underground for the first time was something else entirely. The darkness, the noise, the sheer weight of rock above you – it changes how you think about the data. Meeting the operations teams was humbling too; these are people who’ve spent decades keeping this machine running, and here I come with my Python scripts. I’m excited and slightly terrified, which I think is a good sign.