[D] Intra-lab collaborations

Hi everyone,

I have a question some of you may be able to help me with.

I’m a physician with a background in EE/CS and have been working in ML/AI for the past 12 years or so (cancer genomics, mostly).

I’m now working at a large academic hospital in the US, doing research in clinical AI (not only LLMs but NN/ML in general). I have my own research workstation with a few GPUs and do my own work. Since physicians typically don’t have the ML background I’ve noticed some of them keep coming to me “to ask questions”, not about how to install CUDA in Ubuntu or compile XYZ with gcc, but mainly architectural questions: “How should I analyse this? What model should I use? How do I use LangGraph? (really), etc.”

I don’t mind helping out with very specific questions (pip vs uv; VS Code vs something else) but I feel that the questions I’m getting are more critical to their projects to the level of actual research collaborations and not simply “helping out”. Tiny example: When the PI told us we could get a brand new MBP, I came up with my own specs and they simply tagged along because they didn’t know any better. Not a single “Thank you”; not that I care, it’s just for context.

How do you guys typically handle this? When “being helpful” actually morphs into “being a co-author”? And how does one go about this? Just begin the conversation with “This is a collaboration, right?”

TIA