Exoplanet Pioneer | Mother | Dancer | Sports Lover |
Toronto, Ontario
Joined September 2017
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#SpamDeCientificas Me uno a esta iniciativa. Soy Diana Valencia, astrofisica planetaria, nací en Colombia y ahora soy profesora en la U. Toronto (pit stops en Harvard, MIT, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur). 🇨🇴🇨🇦#WomenInScience
OpenAI announced that one of its models disproved an 80 yr old conjecture in discrete geometry.
openai.com/index/model-dispr…
This feels significant beyond mathematics.
The bottleneck neck is shifting from creation to verification.
Are we ready for this shift?
#AI#FutureOfWork
My mom was the 3rd woman in Colombia to become a chemical engineer. Her brother paid her tuition the 1st yr and then she received a merit award for the rest of her degree, she needed to maintain a high GPA. I never questioned whether I could be good in sciences. Thank you mom.
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Very proud of my student Bo Peng for successfully defending his PhD thesis.
Bo tackled 2 very different streams: magma ocean and atmosphere physics-chemical coupling & carbon outgassing of planetesimals with a different physical-mechanical-chemical model.
Well done!
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Tell me your story. Mine:
Me: how is the safety situation in Colombia?
Him: oh, you don’t live here?
Me: no, we were in France last year and thinking of living in Bogotá for a year
Him: oh, because of your husband’s job?
Me: no, because of mine
Him: puzzled look
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Active volcanism on Venus!! By using archive data (from the 90s) scientists were able to « see » , by comparing images, vents changing side and lava flows from three volcanoes (one reported last year, the other two recently).
jpl.nasa.gov/news/ongoing-ve…
Another night of playing Tetris with the fridge and the dishwasher. I lost to the fridge tonight.
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Finished giving my talk on exoplanets to planetary scientists. This was my first in person talk after Covid, and I was nervous 😬. But in the end, I had a blast.
Shared so many good ideas. Science at its finest. Darn for carbon footprint 👣 #academic
Heading to Earth and Planets Origin Workshop in Paris. Super excited to reconnect with my colleagues. But this #academic mom is with a heavy heart from leaving my girl crying in the train station. Ouch. I know it gets better, but darn.
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Diana Valencia retweeted
If, at the most basic level, you cannot explain what you are doing to a kid, it probably means you don't understand what you are doing. If you need to use big words to explain your model, then it means you're hiding your insecurities. Kids are quite perceptive.
OpenAI called for ‘the best researchers and engineers in the world to meet the [superalignment] challenge’, very proud that my spouse Kristen Menou’s ideas got funded (1 of the 50 out of 2700!) #AIsafety.
The superalignment fast grants are now decided!
We got a *ton* of really strong applications, so unfortunately we had to say no to many we're very excited about.
There is still so much good research waiting to be funded.
Congrats to all recipients!
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Dear science teachers: please don’t ask your students to come up with innovative ideas for the #science fair. I have seen too many flashy projects that are taken from the internet. The students learn not to value their ideas. Instead…
Ask them to test any idea they have. It only has to be original to them. Discourage looking things up online, or even in books, just anything they can think of themselves. As long as they came up with it and follow the scientific method to learn something, then it’s a gold star.
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I wonder, howmuch more science could young Colombians do if they were not thinking about having to pay for the expenses that should be paid for by governing institutions?
On my bday, I had to take my daughter to the hospital because a boy in her third grade class hurt her deliberately 😢. With her good hand she did this
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I thought I would share a very important research result about plastic. In a nutshell, in bottled water they found copious amounts of nano plastic particles that the human bodies assimilate easily (more than microplastics).
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.23…
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Pic update. The amazingly talented Ricardo Pinzon (IG: ricardopinzonhidalgo) is behind the camera.
Special significance that it was taken in the 🏡 I grew up in.
Had no idea I was going to become a professional astronomer. I was raised in a country without such a program.
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Happy Solstice!!
The longest night of the year, and the reason we have so many holidays around this time.
#Solstice
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AI: Google has called governments around the world to intensify their efforts to prepare the labor force for a world automated by AI.
blog.google/outreach-initiat…
I am concerned developing countries might already be at a disadvantage.
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Feedback: I teach my students and kids that feedback is a key, if not the most important part of the learning process.
Yes, in academia we often get all the criticism of what is missing and very little of praise. It can be tough but there are things you can do:
1. Change perspective: the person giving the feedback cares whether about you or the work. Otherwise they would not put the time to give you feedback
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