Roger Tam

Associate Professor, UBC School of Biomedical Engineering. Director, Engineers in Scrubs Program. AI in Health Researcher.

[Francis Bach @BachFrancis]

My book is (at last) out, just in time for Christmas!
A blog post to celebrate and present it: https://t.co/ttRo04efDF

[Nika Shakiba @nika_shakiba]

📢 @CarldeBoerPhD and I are looking for a postdoc to lead an exciting collaborative project involving scRNAseq, gene regulatory networks 🧬, and stem cell to lung cell diff 🫁

Apply here by Jan 8: https://t.co/lRSVUrCtpl

Plz RT!

[Bob Sutton @work_matters]

More evidence for the power of wisdom, for the power of balancing confidence and doubt. Or as Adam would put for being ready to "Think Again."

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Insecure people strive to prove their intelligence. They're quick to assure us that they have the answer—they're determined to be right.

Secure people aim to improve their intelligence. They're quick to speak up when they have questions—they're focused on getting it right.

[Julien Cohen-Adad @jcohenadad]

Canada Research Chair & Tenure track position within the physics department at @polymtl in emerging technology related to health, information, energy or environmental applications.

https://t.co/yZ9E59arwJ

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

In a distracted world, the most underrated leadership skill is listening.

144 studies, 155k people: Good listeners have deeper bonds and better results. We feel valued, and they get smarter.

Great leaders are devoted learners. A key to learning is to listen more than you talk.

[Bookism @1Bookism]

"The biggest barrier to success is not the lack of opportunity, but the abundance of distractions."

- Deep Work

[Spinal Cord Toolbox (SCT) @SpinalToolbox]

📢 We are happy to announce that we will be hosting a free virtual Spinal Cord Toolbox (SCT) Course on December 9-10, 2024. 🎉

Check out our announcement on @INCForg's @neuroquestion forum: https://t.co/JLaksahJW9

Course details can be found here: https://t.co/vXwjE7fEff

[MICCAI Society @MICCAI_Society]

📢 We are thrilled to announce that #MICCAI2026 will be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE! 👏 This will be our first #MICCAI conference in the Middle East.
Save the date!
🗓️  Oct 4-8, 2026
🔗https://t.co/5jiVnxosaL
@MiccaiStudents @RMiccai @WomenInMICCAI
#ai #deeplearning #imaging

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Typing “how r u” is not a smart way to save time. It signals that the receiver isn’t worth your time.

8 studies: When we use text abbreviations, others are less responsive. Shortcuts seem insincere, reducing their interest in engaging.

In relationships, a little effort goes a long way.

[StarFish Medical @StarFishMedical]

We are seeking a Senior NPI Engineer to join our team in #VictoriaBC or #Toronto. Drive product design transfers and ensure seamless transitions from development to market-ready solutions.

https://t.co/2TgHmI7pQm

[UBC Applied Science @ubcappscience]

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Xiaoliang Jin, Dr. Nadja Kunz, Dr. Nika Shakiba, Dr. Lyndia Wu and Dr. Naomi Zimmerman on being named among this year’s new and renewed Canada Research Chairs.

Learn more: https://t.co/FlY4jyQgg4

@UBCMech @SBME_UBC

[StarFish Medical @StarFishMedical]

Join our team as a Program Director in #VictoriaBC or #Toronto. Utilize your 15+ years of experience to lead a multi-million-dollar portfolio of innovative medical device development and make a profound impact on patient care. #medtech #programmanagement

https://t.co/EDONwdw4lp

[Tim Dettmers @Tim_Dettmers]

This is the most important paper in a long time . It shows with strong evidence we are reaching the limits of quantization. The paper says this: the more tokens you train on, the more precision you need. This has broad implications for the entire field and the future of GPUs🧵

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Moravec's paradox in LLM evals

I was reacting to this new benchmark of frontier math where LLMs only solve 2%. It was introduced because LLMs are increasingly crushing existing math benchmarks. The interesting issue is that even though by many accounts (/evals), LLMs are inching well into top expert territory (e.g. in math and coding etc.), you wouldn't hire them over a person for the most menial jobs. They can solve complex closed problems if you serve them the problem description neatly on a platter in the prompt, but they struggle to coherently string together long, autonomous, problem-solving sequences in a way that a person would find very easy.

This is Moravec's paradox in disguise, who observed 30+ years ago that what is easy/hard for humans can be non-intuitively very different to what is easy/hard for computers. E.g. humans are very impressed by computers playing chess, but chess is easy for computers as it is a closed, deterministic system with a discrete action space, full observability, etc etc. Vice versa, humans can tie a shoe or fold a shirt and don't think much of it at all but this is an extremely complex sensorimotor task that challenges the state of the art in both hardware and software. It's like that Rubik's Cube release from OpenAI a while back where most people fixated on the solving itself (which is trivial) instead of the actually incredibly difficult task of just turning one face of the cube with a robot hand.

So I really like this FrontierMath benchmark and we should make more. But I also think it's an interesting challenge how we can create evals for all the "easy" stuff that is secretly hard. Very long context windows, coherence, autonomy, common sense, multimodal I/O that works, ... How do we build good "menial job" evals? The kinds of things you'd expect from any entry-level intern on your team.

[Dr. Esther Chin MD MGSC @estherchinmd]

Excited for this event for @McmasterUgme tomorrow! @STITCHsurgmodel will be at the in-person workshop for attendees to try 🙌 @machealthsci @McMasterPGME @UBC_Global_Surg @GlobalSurgLab

[Science in Vancouver @ScienceVancity]

🤰 The leading cause of maternal deaths worldwide is #PostpartumHemorrhage (PPH).

To better manage PPE, @SBME_UBC's Engineers in Scrubs Team have developed STITCH, a low-cost and portable surgical simulator to teach, learn, and practice advanced surgery: https://t.co/Dp9eozqaIH

[Michael Black @Michael_J_Black]

Many people are in the middle of the @CVPR deadline. So I'm sharing my guide to writing a CVPR paper (or any paper). My students have had this for years but I haven't shared it publicly before. I hope you find it useful and write a great paper. #CVPR2025 https://t.co/RAvnQFnuLQ

[Bob Sutton @work_matters]

A pet peeve:

Please, please you don't want to sound like a passive aggressive asshole, when you do something someone else finds dumb, insensitive, or otherwise wrong, DO NOT WRITE: "I am sorry you feel that way"

Instead, say something like, "Forgive us, it was our mistake"