Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

The Executive Lens

less than 1 minute read

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Rewrote the industry portfolio entries today. Realized that the way I described these projects – starting with XGBoost hyperparameters and Kedro pipelines – was the view from the developer’s chair. But I haven’t sat in that chair for a while now. The +100 TPH isn’t interesting because of the model architecture; it’s interesting because of what it means for the operation’s annual throughput. The 15% alert reduction matters because a mine that violates environmental regulations can be shut down. Added business impact sections, KPI tables, strategic context. The technical details are still there – they just come after the “why it matters” part. It’s a small reordering that changes the entire story. The same work, viewed through a different lens, tells you something different about who did it and why. Feels more honest about where I actually spend my time these days.

Mining optimization — now described through the business lens

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Week in review: From developer portfolios to executive narratives

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This week’s biggest change wasn’t technical – it was narrative. I restructured six industry portfolio entries to lead with business impact instead of algorithms. The shift reflects a real career evolution: from implementing models to owning their business outcomes.

Week in review: Vectorization, numerical stability, and biological accuracy

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Modernizing eight research codebases at once sounds like a terrible idea, and some weeks it feels like one. But working across optics, biophysics, robotics, and geostatistics in parallel has surfaced a pattern: the same three engineering challenges keep showing up in every domain, wearing different clothes.

The first SOFI implementation in Chile, modernized

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In 2012, I started working on Super-resolution Optical Fluctuation Imaging at SCIAN-Lab, Universidad de Chile, collaborating remotely with researchers at the III Physics Institute of the University of Gottingen in Germany. Working across continents and time zones with the Gottingen team was both challenging and exhilarating – SOFI was a relatively new technique at the time, and there was limited local expertise in Chile to draw on. Every implementation decision, from the cumulant computation pipeline to the deconvolution strategy, required careful coordination through emails and video calls, often debugging numerical issues with a six-hour time difference. The goal was to implement SOFI from the ground up – cumulant computation, synthetic quantum dot simulators, deconvolution – and apply it to biological samples. After months of work, we achieved the first successful SOFI super-resolution imaging in Chile, resolving structures below the diffraction limit using nothing more than temporal statistics from blinking fluorescent emitters. The pride of being the first group in Chile to produce these results was immense – it proved that cutting-edge computational optics could be done here, not just in European labs with larger budgets and established traditions in the field. That work contributed to a publication at SPIE Photonics West, presenting the cumulant-based framework and validation results.