Hi! I’m Mike, and I am excited to be helping you to enjoy the bootcamp!
I’m probably not going to meet your stereotype for a peer supporter for AI Engineering. I am a pediatric intensive care physician who practiced in the Pediatric ICU at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Primary Children’s Hospital after I moved to Salt Lake City. I was Division Chief for 35 years, Department Chairman and Medical Director of Primary for two years, and when I finally retired in July 2024, I had been the Associate Dean for Clinical Research for the University of Utah. The most critical achievements were in clinical research, and when I retired, more than 150 people worked for me.
Why am I here? In 1992 I became heavily involved with probabilistic database linkage and statistical analyses of large (at the time!) databases to study injury risk factors. Then I began coordinating multi-center clinical trials with extensive Federal funds, establishing the Utah Data Coordinating Center (https://medicine.utah.edu/pediatrics/research/data-center), and I stopped clinical care of patients to work full time in clinical trial research. I became sophisticated in IT, statistics, data management, and obviously I wrote a lot of Federal grants, primarily to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We have about 100 active studies, and each required an enormous amount of expensive talented research expert effort, writing protocols, designing studies, etc. After November 2022, I became fascinated with the potential for AI to be used to streamline this effort. I have given national lectures about AI and LLMs to medical conferences, played with a host of open source models on my own 128 GB Apple Silicon, and tried to develop applications that could process clinical trial protocols. After a year of YouTube and mostly being unproductive, I finally enrolled in AIE4, right after I retired! It was transformative, because it provided practical information (from a firehose) and imposed deadlines!
I have 50 years (yikes!) of programming experience, starting with BASIC and proceeding through Pascal, C, LISP, Java, Objective C, Swift, and ending up, oddly enough, in Python. I have 30 years of experience with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. Since I had a lot of smart people around me, however, my experiences also had to include organizational management and strategic planning for our research operation. Hence the importance of getting end-to-end LLM apps in place to make our DCC competitive.
… understanding five hours of information delivered in two hours, twice a week, for ten weeks.
… figuring out dependency hell and solving the problems of finishing each assignment.
… keeping a focus on the goal for the training, including the project that will get developed during the course. I advised hundreds of type A clinical investigators on their grant proposals, generally by focusing them.
… coming to grips with LLM reality. EVERYTHING is hallucination, and sometimes (pretty often!) it corresponds with reality.
… having fun during the bootcamp.
… FINISHING! Becoming certified takes concerted effort, and I look forward to helping you attain that goal.