It had great success, now when I propose to them to use some model to do something, they tends to avoid.

Maybe software tinkerer?

I only use it on a sentence or paragraph basis, otherwise it misses the point 90% of the time.

I would strongly advise against this use for the moment. The important part of reading a paper is not only to extract general rules, but to build your own internal model. Without it you cannot effectively do research. The main interesting points are often in the subtleties of the details deep in the paper.

Internal tought that come easily to mind when I read :

- 'oh they used that equation, but that could be also be interpreted totally differently, what happens if we change point of view, does it makes sense from this other perspective'

- 'I see they claim to achieve better results than sota, but actually, they compared with other methods that are not solving exactly the same problem, what shortcut or changes did they had to do to obtain a fair comparison, is it a fair comparison, can I trust those numbers? '

- 'oh, the authors didn't realize that they solved this other problem, or did they realize but there was a block somewhere preventing it?'

- 'I like this trick to achieve that result, but at the same time, it will prevent to solve a whole class of other problems, so their method will not work on those cases'

...

Also, notice that a paper IS a summary of multiple months/years of work, and researchers summarize it already to the maximum to stay within the page limit, by summarizing a summary you will always miss many things.

Also, a collaborator is usually not a stranger over the internet, it's often someone who you know and you already worked with, so it is not that ackward to expose a new idea and propose to work together.

It takes time and social skills to make long lasting collaborations, the two parties must trust each other in order to collaborate. In this context, exchanging ideas is not really an issue.

Having said that, it's probably a good course, CMU courses are often great.

I was just expecting way more sota models in many fields due to the title.

If someone has this kind of ressource I would be extremely interested!

However, I use Manim for maths, for me having computational libraries (python) is a requirement. Most of the transformations that I do are found by using linear algebra, calculus and sometimes full neural networks. All my geometry is computed, not placed by hand.

I'm wondering if it would not be possible to have a 'canvas' backend for the web in the python version instead.

Btw, Manim is kind of easy to install in its own docker ;)

I only argue that if they are equal in quality of treatment and the 'total cost' is the evaluation parameter, it is way more complex than the treatment itself, and it could be justified to use proton therapy, even if more expensive.

Nice talk anyways :)

From my visits, they mostly focus on children that have some very nasty cancers, the IBA hospitals are all designed with children in mind (to avoid stressing them), and from my memory, a unique hospital is often enough to treat a whole country for the kind of cancer they target.

Now, if it is on par with classical radiotherapy BUT it gives less subsequent problems, it might be worth the cost as subsequent problems can be as expensive or even more than the original treatment. It becomes an actuarial issue to know where is the tradeoff.

https://www.mdanderson.org/newsroom/research-newsroom/proton...

But on the subject of discoveries and practical uses, the IBA cyclotrons are also used for other purposes than proton therapy: cleaning exotic fruits from dangerous substances and personalized medicine.

It can deliver radiations to the brain that will peak at the exact position of the cancer, and reduce irradiation in sane tissues. The 'better' is 'less irradiation to sane tissues' that in turn reduces the risk for new cancers.

Note: I'm not expert on the matter, but I had technical visits to IBA and know several PhDs that work there

There are way more opportunities with other countries that I'm aware of, mostly EU-EU.

I did again the same book this year, this time spending much time questioning an llm about concepts that I couldn't grasp, copy pasting sections of the book and ask to rewrite for my understanding, asking for fast visualization scripts for concepts, ask to give me corrected examples, concrete examples, to link several chapters together, etc..

It was still painful, but in 2 months (~8h-10h a day) I covered the book in many more details that what I ever could do some years ago.

Of course I still got some memories of the content from that time, and I'm better prepared as I have studied other things in the meantime. Also the model sometimes give bad explanations and bad links, so you must stay really critic about the output. (same goes for plots code)

But I missed a lot of deep insights years ago, and now, everything is perfectly clear in two months.

The ability to create instant plots for concepts that I try to learn was invaluable, then asking the model to twist the plot, change the data, use some other method, compare methods, etc..

Note: for every part, when I finally grasped it, I rewrited it in my own notes and style, and asked the model often to critic my notes and improve a bit. But all the concepts that I wrote down, I truly understand them deeply.

Of course, this is not coding, but for learning at least, LLMs were extremely helpful for me.

By this experiments I would say at least 6x speedup.

'This next thing is the best idea ever and you will agree! Recruiters want to sell bananas '

'OK, good, what is the... '

I hope this is catched by the grading system afterward.

(I invented some kind of metric based on a centered gaussian around a country ahaha)

One big issue that I had is that the system asked for a number in dollars, but if I answer $2000,2000,2000 per agent per month, the answer was always the same, I cannot accept a number, give it in words, after many tries I stopped playing, it wasn't clear what it wanted.

I could see myself using the system. With another voice as it was kind of agressive. More guidelines would be needed to know exactly how to pass a question or specify numbers.

I don't know my grade, so I don't know how much we can bullshit the system and pass

I never found anybody taking about Greiner, and at this point, I'm way too afraid to ask why.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Greiner

https://youtu.be/1qhqZ9ECm70?si=ESfE4ITfmSrq508y

Truly impressive video.