Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

Personal daily events

2024

One Month Solo

less than 1 minute read

Published:

For a brief window between leaving CODELCO and joining Accenture, I went solo. Independent consulting, just me and my laptop. The project was interesting – clay classification using hyperspectral drone imagery, which is exactly the kind of niche problem I love. The freedom of being your own boss is intoxicating: no meetings about meetings, no corporate overhead, just the work. But the uncertainty is real too. You’re one client away from having nothing. It gave me a new respect for people who do this full-time. A short chapter, but a useful one – sometimes you need to taste independence to appreciate what structure gives you.

Closing a Chapter at CODELCO

less than 1 minute read

Published:

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

less than 1 minute read

Published:

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

less than 1 minute read

Published:

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.