Just wrapped up a talk at #positconf2025 about LLM evaluation with R! Such a joy to hang out with #rstats folks in person and hear about what others are working on. Resources and slides: github.com/simonpcouch/...

my most recent hot take: after a year working inside my hospital’s IT system, i’m increasingly convinced that clinical informatics should have been a residency (like pathology or radiology), not a fellowship.

as i prepare to go back to med school, i am haunted daily by the number of my med school classmates (who are now residents, fellows, or attendings) who have reached out to me to learn about my side-career in health tech because they want to explore alternatives to a full-time clinical career

today i got an email in which a statistician cited a paper from over 200 years ago and all i could think is how that’s the kind of power computer scientists wish they had

I feel like every paper I read about LLMs in health care takes for granted that the encouraging, but not necessarily transformative, results we’ve seen so far are going to scale upward as LLMs improve. But are we really safe to assume that LLMs will keep getting better? I’m not so sure.

forced my physician collaborators to listen to me talk about partial derivatives today

It’s finally out! We brought a multidisciplinary team of physicians, computer scientists, and engineers to red team LLMs for healthcare uses. And we have shared the dataset! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

i’m working on a few really cool applications of LLMs in health right now (in the real world, in a deployment environment) and my most valuable asset by far in this work isn’t being the most technical person on the team (i’m not); it’s knowing just enough about medicine to ask the right questions

Dr. @emilyalsentzer.bsky.social, a Stanford faculty member and expert in clinical #AI, discusses the evolution of natural language processing, the challenges of AI in clinical settings, and what the future holds for open-source medical AI. Full episode: nejm.ai/4gOGeSo #MedSky #MLSky

"What I find hard to reconcile is, on the one hand, we want to not fall behind on AI writ large. And on the other hand, the very people we need to ensure that agility are being let go.”—Nigam Shah @stanfordhai.bsky.social

i have to respect how non-technical folks use spreadsheets - they give you these beautiful murals with all kinds of colors and spacing and intricate patterns. i must say it really breaks my heart to immediately flatten it all with read_csv

i’ve been trying to understand why reporting some estimate of confidence intervals around performance metrics (or null hypothesis significance testing) is not more common in the machine learning/AI literature. i think this is changing, but there’s still a lot of weird (or missing) statistics ime

i think the vast ambiguity in the term “data scientist” causes a lot of headaches. am i an engineer? am i a computer scientist? am i a statistician? who knows!!!

started my day writing a few (simple) statistical proofs for a data science project (to justify simplifying a calculation from something complicated to something simpler and equivalent) and wow it really is nice to dust off the old PhD and put it to use every once in a while

i rounded on stanford’s palliative medicine service today, and it was such a powerful reminder that end-of-life care clinicians are some of the most kind and empathetic people in health care. truly in awe of their ability to bear witness to (and guide people through) such difficult moments

if i could distill my time in the world of health ai down to a single thesis statement, i think it would be that imo everyone in health care (patients, health care workers, researchers, caregivers of all kinds) should have a very, very healthy dose of skepticism about every ai product they encounter

Whattt?!

Now more than ever the world should learn about the life and impact of @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social neuroscientist Ben Barres, the movie is underway! @atqmovie.bsky.social

This isn't really an #rstats vs #python thing but rather a tidyverse vs pandas thing, and for data wrangling the tidyverse API is just so darn good it's hard to compete with, which is why there are ports of it to other languages, e.g. Tidier in #julia, siuba in python

one of the guiding principles of my life as a scientist (inherited from a mentor who has since passed away) has been to resist the incentives that foster egoism, possessiveness, and competition over collaboration in science - and to instead lead with generosity, openness, and lifting others up.

i’ve been working on the ai team at stanford health care for about a year and the overwhelming take-home message for me so far is to be increasingly horrified at how aggressively ai vendors will market their products without any apparent obligation to demonstrate that they actually work

i’ve been off the internet (ie tw*tter) for so long that i actually don’t remember how to write in pithy short-form anymore. all of my “terminally online” references are from 2022. i have 0 memes saved in my camera roll. i have a phd now like the vibes have shifted bro what do i do

Maybe I’ll actually start using this app. What’s the vibe? Who should I follow?

now that i’ve followed a few people i’m really eager to take this new recommendation algorithm for a spin