Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

Personal daily events

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.

2021

New Beginnings at Alaya

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Today was my first real week at Alaya Digital Solutions, leading the analytics teams. It feels strange to step out of the academic bubble and into the world of industry consulting. The pace is completely different – no more waiting months for paper reviews, now it’s deliverables and client calls. The variety is wild though. One day I’m looking at mining data, the next it’s aquaculture, then retail. I’m still figuring out how to context-switch between such different industries, but honestly, it’s refreshing. The office itself is small – a startup vibe, everyone knows everyone, decisions happen fast. After years of carefully designing experiments and waiting for simulation results, now there are clients waiting for answers by Friday. The shock of going from academic research timelines to commercial deadlines is real. You learn to ship things that are good enough instead of obsessing over perfection, which is a lesson I probably needed. Let’s see where this goes.