Week 8! I moved to Austin the past Saturday, it’s crazy to think that it’s been a week here! It’s been really awesome and I love the UT community, convenience, apartment, and area. 🌞🤠

This week has mostly been a massive recruiting effort. After sending out emails to ~20+ MD students and connects, I didn’t really find any luck recruiting through email, and went back to Upwork. On Upwork, out of the ~112 applicants/proposals we received, I shared a sample/screening task of annotation to ~40 with suitable medical expert annotations, and so far have received sample work from ~20 of the medical expert applicants. I have been reviewing them with my co-lead Sebastian, and out of the ~20, there are ~4 medical experts that seem promising and fit for our work, which is exciting, because at least we have the potential to hire them and get the annotation rolling.

At the same time, I’ve been looking at automatic claim filtering, and recently read VERISCORE, the paper for verifiable claims more closely, and am planning to run the open-sourced pipeline and prompts on our claim set to automatically filter. I honestly feel like I haven’t done intensive experiments in quite a while, so I’m excited to get back on it. After filtering, still need to do the retrieval pipeline for more abstracts, and then read more into fine-tuning and distillation for this task, as well as do more system baselines.

Into week 8, research feels like its going and at the same time there’s so much left to do all at once, but I’m managing it bit by bit. I’m really liking the Austin environment, and I’ve been trying to maintain a decently healthy independent lifestyle here, sleeping and waking up relatively early, attempting to cook my own brunch and dinner, going to Pilates everyday (really enjoy the Megaformer studio at Pure Pilates Austin in West Campus), and going to the gym on a semi-regular basis.

Cheers to almost finalizing our medical expert team for annotation, and to making more progress on experiments for this project! I’m also excited to meet in person with my PI at the office next week, and hopefully meet more people in the UT NLP/ML/AI research ecosystem. 🤠🤠🤠🤠