Valliani told Geekwire that she co-founded Glow because of her belief in a “well-funded, thriving media.” Her idea was not initially well-received. “Most people looked at me like I was crazy when I said that I was making it easy for podcasters to charge for content. No one thought that people would actually pay for podcasts on a large scale,” she said. “I’m proud of this acquisition because it’s a demonstration that things have changed.”
Last weekend, upper school economics teacher Sam Lepler caught up with several Harker alumni during a trip to Philadelphia. While visiting family in Pennsylvania, Lepler put out a call to alumni in the area to see if they would like to meet. Within hours, he was sitting down to dinner with Megan Cardosi ’18, David Feng ’20, Ria Ghandi ’17, Rashmi Iyer ’20, Kelly Shen ’19, Kevin Xu ’18 and Shaya Zarkesh ’18. “I just stepped out for a bit and they all came to meet,” said Lepler. “It was super fun seeing them all.”
The group chatted about life at the University of Pennsylvania and how it has changed a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. “They told me that it’s awesome to be on campus from January – last semester was fully remote – and that even though the classes remain virtual, they are enjoying life in the dorms or off-campus housing, joining the ski club, and diving into life at Penn,” said Lepler. “It was truly awesome to see alums from all of the last four years, and I was genuinely honored that so many came out on such short notice.”
The cast and crew of the 2021 upper school spring musical, “Les Misérables,” went above and beyond to create a full-length film of their on-stage production, which is now available to view at Harker’s Vimeo page. For this through-sung production, cast members sang their lines individually at home and were later filmed acting their parts at the Patil Theater, which contained an elaborate set. For an in-depth look at the work that went into this incredible production, see Harker Aquila’s feature story on the musical.
Last week, senior Utkarsh Priyam was named one of 625 semifinalists in the 2021 Presidential Scholars competition. These semifinalists were selected from 6,500 candidates in the competition, who were selected from 3.6 million graduating seniors. Priyam is one of 12 seniors who were selected as candidates in this year’s competition, which each year identifies students who have excelled in academics, the arts, and career and technical education. As part of their application, candidates submit materials including essays, transcripts and self-assessments. The Presidential Scholars program was created by the U.S. Department of Education in 1964 and is recognized as one of the highest honors U.S. high school students can receive.
Harker upper and middle school VEX robotics teams had a very successful year, with seven teams qualifying for the world championship in May and four winning awards at the recent California State Championship. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most VEX events were held remotely. Live Remote Skills (LRS) events challenged a single robot to score as many points as it could, whereas Live Remote Tournament (LRT) events pitted a pair of robots against each other to score as many points as possible. Throughout the season, the teams participated in various LRS and LRT events, improved their robots and persevered through the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sophomores Amrita Pasupathy and Nidhya Shivakumar were tournament finalists in the California High School State LRT Championship and are currently ranked 12th in high school World Robot Skills Rankings. At the California High School State LRS Championship, ninth graders Jordan Labio, Sriram Bhimaraju and Zachary Blue were the Robot Skills Champions and earned the Excellence Award given to the top all-around team, based on robot performance and judging. Ninth graders Ella Yee and Julie Shi qualified for the state championships by being a Robot Skills Runner Up at an earlier LRS event.
In the California Middle School State LRS Championship, the one-person team of eighth grader Kaitlyn Su was named the Robot Skills Champion and earned the Amaze Award for having the top performing robot. She is also ranked first in middle school World Robot Skills Rankings. In the same event, seventh graders Janam Chahal, Kimi Yashar, MacEnzie Blue and Minal Jalil, earned the Design Award given to the team with the most effective robot design process. Sixth graders Rohan Goyal, Krishna Muddu, Risa Chokhawala, Orion Ghai and Ayden Grover qualified for the state championships. They earned a spot in the World Championship by claiming Robot Skills Runner-Up at an earlier LRS event. Spark Robotics — made up of eighth graders Vedant Balachandran, Rushil Jaiswal, Rishi Lalwani and Shivraj Panja, who also presented at the 2021 Harker Research Symposium — also qualified for worlds.
This story was submitted by speech and debate department chair Jenny Achten.
Senior Andrew Sun was named the congressional debate national champion at the online Tournament of Champions, hosted by the University of Kentucky. This tournament is difficult for students to even qualify to attend, let alone win first place! Students must place highly at regular season tournaments to be invited to attend the event.
Joining Sun in winning awards were seniors Akshay Manglik and Andy Lee, as well as juniors Anshul Reddy and Deven Shah, in Lincoln-Douglas debate. Junior William Chien and sophomore Michelle Jin placed in extemporaneous speaking. Junior Vedant Kenkare won a speaker award in public forum debate. Finally, junior Andrea Thia and sophomore Dyllan Han were in elimination rounds in original oratory. The coaches were also very proud of the other students who qualified to compete at the event, including senior Nathan Ohana, juniors Caden Lin, Arnav Jain and Rohan Rashingkar, sophomores Sara Wan, Carol Wininger, Austina Xu and Rahul Mulpuri, and freshmen Ansh Sheth, Max Xing and Iris Fu. Sun summarized his feelings about the weekend by saying, “Thanks to my amazing parents, coaches and friends (both in and out of congress) — it’s your support that makes this possible! Go Eagles!”
Upper school students had two big recent successes in economics competitions. Karan Bhasin, grade 12, recently won in the grades 11-12 category in the Council for Economic Education’s 2021 Student Video Contest, in which students were asked to make a one-minute video containing economic advice they would give to President Joe Biden. Bhasin’s ideas included targeted economic relief for those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, providing resources to local governments and bringing solar power to low-income neighborhoods.
On April 18, juniors Shrey Khater, Melody Luo, Ayan Nath and Yejin Song won the Brattle Economic Case Presentation portion of the UChicago DSP Pre-Collegiate Business and Economics Competition. This event gave each team eight to 10 minutes to present a solution to an assigned case study, after which the students were asked follow-up questions about their presentations by the judges.
From April 9-10, Harker hosted the 15th annual Research Symposium, inviting the Harker community to experience the breadth of its research opportunities by viewing student presentations and hearing keynote speakers deliver fascinating talks on the theme of this year’s event: artificial intelligence, robotics and automation. The 2020 symposium was canceled due to safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year’s symposium was held virtually with all presentations, keynote talks and exhibitions delivered via Zoom, requiring impressive coordination between event organizers, presenters and technology staff.
Throughout the two-day event, middle and upper school students delivered poster presentations on research they had conducted on topics such as environmental science, physics, astronomy and medicine. The presentations were held in special breakout rooms, with plenty of time scheduled for each speaker. Corporate exhibitors – which included Microsoft, NVidia, Oculus and ZeroUI – each received their own room that visitors could drop into at their leisure, mimicking the atmosphere of the exhibition area in previous years.
The event kicked off on Friday with Wayne Liu of Perfect Corp, whose app YouCam Makeup allows users to demo beauty products using artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology, and was named one of Time Magazine’s best innovations of 2020. Liu provided an overview of the history of artificial intelligence and how it developed into the technology used by YouCam Makeup. “Facial recognition is not new,” he said, “However, to get to the point where you can [try on makeup virtually] … the technology needs to be very precise.” To achieve this precision, Perfect Corp gathered and analyzed millions of hair color and skin tone samples, and their app uses 3,900 polygon meshes to achieve accurate results.
Dr. Ben Chung, associate professor of urology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, provided an overview of robotics-enabled surgery and how it has been used to make certain very difficult procedures much easier and safer, such as the removal of prostate cancer. He also showed footage of his own procedures using surgical robots in which he removed a tumor from a kidney. “Where the robotic platform really helps us is the ease of the suture,” he said. “Making sure that your suturing is exact is really important because you need to make sure that the patient doesn’t bleed afterwards.” As the technology of robotic surgery evolves, Dr. Chung said, it will be applicable to more situations, such as conducting surgery over long distances in situations such as on a battlefield or in a space station.
Any discussion of artificial intelligence and robotics invariably touches on the legal and ethical aspects of these fields, and Ryan Calo’s presentation on legal rulings on the use of robots was a great forum for the topic. Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, explained that “robots have been with us for a very long and so we shouldn’t really be surprised that occasionally they have led to legal disputes.” These disputes extend as far back as the 1880s, when it was questioned whether using artificial wooden coins in vending machines constituted fraud. In the 1950s, courts found that robots could not be defined as dolls because they were not representations of human beings and thus could not be subjected to the same tariffs. Present day debates have centered on the ownership of artifacts retrieved by robots from shipwrecks and how to prosecute crimes in which machines are used to steal from homes.
Fitting for the symposium’s 15th anniversary, this year’s alumni keynote was delivered by Yi Sun ‘06, who 15 years ago was Harker’s first Science Talent Search finalist and a member of Harker’s first US Math Olympiad team, winning a silver medal. In his talk Sun, who now works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s department of statistics, explained the process of how machine learning tasks often involve discerning signals from “noisy observations.” Using detailed diagrams, Sun discussed the mathematical concepts underlying the problem and how they are used to process data for electron microscopy.
The final keynote speaker for this year was Chelsea Finn, assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University, who presented on the process of teaching robots how to learn and solve problems the way humans do. Finn noted that while it was possible to teach robots to do certain tasks – such as piecing together a toy airplane or place shapes into a cube – through trial and error, these robots became highly specialized due to gathering data from very controlled environments using specific tools. Teaching robots how to perform “simpler, but broader” tasks with a greater range of applications is much more difficult, and Finn explained the methods she and her team have used to create robot “generalists.”
Late last week, senior Anna Vazhaeparambil was named a runner-up in the JEA Journalist of the Year contest. JEA recognized Vazhaeparambil for her dedication to improving coverage of junior varsity and girls sports. “While we would cover every single football game, for example, there would only be one or two articles written about softball or girls water polo,” she told JEA. Her mission to increase diversity in reporting informed her later work covering political events such as elections and protests. Jurors praised Vazhaeparambil for her perseverance and ability to cover a wide range of topics as well as her leadership qualities.
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March 5, 2021:
Senior Anna Vazhaeparambil, who serves as editor-in-chief of the student news website Harker Aquila, was selected as California Journalist of the Year by the Journalism Education Association. As the California representative in JEA’s Journalist of the Year competition, her portfolio will be evaluated during the spring JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention. The top winner will receive a $3,000 scholarship and up to three runners up each will receive an $850 scholarship. Vazhaeparambil also was awarded the top $500 prize in the Arnetta Garcin Memorial Scholarship, which she was eligible for because Harker journalism advisor Ellen Austin is a JEA of Northern California member.
This story was submitted by speech and debate department chair Jenny Achten.
Harker closed out the national championship final round in Lincoln-Douglas debate. Seniors Andy Lee and Akshay Manglik met in the final round and were declared co-champions, along with junior Deven Shah, who was walked over in semifinals by Lee.
After six tough preliminary rounds, the tournament created a single elimination bracket of the top 32 debaters, meaning that the students had to win debate after debate to close out finals. Lee, Manglik and Shah were also joined by junior Anshul Reddy and sophomore Rahul Mulpuri in winning top 20 speaker awards. Reddy and Mulpuri, along with sophomore Deeya Viradia and freshman Ansh Sheth, were also in elimination rounds, giving Harker the best overall representation in elimination rounds.
The online tournament was hosted by the National Debate Coaches Association. In all, 104 schools, representing 28 states, competed at the tournament. Coach Greg Achten was named one of three finalists for Educator of the Year by the organization. Lee summed up the weekend well, saying, “It was a team effort. We could not have done it without our amazing coaches and teammates who continued helping, even when they were no longer in the tournament.”