Amy Jin ’18 drew a fine accolade from the City of San Jose via Councilmember Chappie Jones, who, along with Mayor Sam Liccardo, presented her with a commendation yesterday.
The midday meeting, held in council chambers, celebrated Jin for being named one of five students nationwide to receive the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing from the Computer Science Teachers Association in March.
Jones, who represents the city council district in which Harker resides, noted, “Amy Jin just graduated from high school and she is already proving to be such an accomplished young person. I was honored to present Amy with a commendation at City Council for being 1 of 5 students in the nation to win the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing.”
In describing her work, Jin said, “Every year, 7 million patients suffer surgical complications, many of which are caused by poor operative skill due to lack of individualized training and feedback. Improving these surgical outcomes means evaluating surgeon performance, a time-consuming process requiring expert supervision. Thus, I developed a deep-learning approach to automatically assess operative technique, functioning as a ‘coach’ for surgeons.
“I leveraged a convolutional neural network to teach computers to classify and localize surgical instruments in videos in real time. Increasing accuracy for tool presence detection by 28 percent and tracking instrument locations, my approach enabled rich analysis of surgical performance. It expedites surgical skill assessment through automated extraction of visual and quantitative metrics, such as tool usage patterns and trajectories, movement range and motion economy. My results have been validated by surgeons, setting the stage for building a context-aware system that can assist surgeons during procedures and provide targeted feedback.”
Jin’s other recognition includes a best paper award at the 2017 Machine Learning for Health Workshop at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, and being named a Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar. Jin is also a John Near Endowment recipient and a National Merit Scholarship awardee. She plays classical violin and has performed at Carnegie Hall. Read more in this Harker News story. https://staging.news.harker.org/senior-amy-jin-one-of-five-in-the-country-to-win-cutler-bell-prize-in-high-school-computing/
The transitional kindergarten class participated in a “field day” in early June. After discovering some fossil footprints along a path behind the STEM Lab, the students wondered whether dinosaurs roamed the Harker Preschool campus 10,000 years ago. Grabbing buckets, shovels and sifters, the students excavated the sand pit next to the path and discovered bones! Students collaborated on sorting, comparing and measuring the bones. The archeologists had a great time!
At last month’s MathCounts National Competition in Washington, D.C., the California team, featuring eighth grader Rishab Parthasarathy (pictured, second from left) and coached by middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam (far left), took second place overall. The event included 224 competitors from 56 teams, one from each of the 50 states and three U.S. territories (the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam), as well as teams representing the District of Columbia, State Department and Department of Defense. All of the members of California’s team were among the top 10 percent.
The second-place performance at MathCounts capped off a successful spring semester for middle school math students, who also had a stellar showing at the California Math League (CAML) contest in February, where all three middle school teams placed first in their region, which contains Placer, Santa Clara and Yolo Counties. Top scorers for grade 6 were Gautam Bhooma, Varun Fuloria, Emma Gao and Aniketh Tummala, who each scored 33 points, and Joe Li, Claire Luo, Julie Shi, Ella Yee and William Zhang with 31 points. In grade 7, Sally Zhu scored a perfect 35, Riya Gupta had 34 points and Tiffany Chang, Ashley Hu, Anthony Tong and Sabrina Zhu each earned 33 points. Eighth graders Alexander Hu, Rishab Parthasarathy, Kevin Wang and Gloria Zhu earned a perfect 35 points, while classmates Mark Hu, Angela Jia, Rohan Thakur and William Zhao scored 34. Esther Wu earned an impressive 33 points.
The next round of winners in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition was announced today, this time for college-sponsored merit scholarships. Recent graduates Akhil Arun, Matthew Lee, Jacob Ohana and Patrick Zhong were among those listed as winners, bringing Harker’s total of National Merit scholarship winners for the year up to 17.
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Eight more Harker seniors were named winners in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition last week. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation identified Megan Tjandrasuwita, Jerry Chen, Gwyneth Chen, Morgan Douglas, Anooshree Sengupta, Andrew Semenza, Kaitlin Hsu and Swapnil Garg as $2,500 scholarship winners.
These students and other Bay Area National Merit winners were mentioned in a story by the San Jose Mercury News, published Friday.
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Last week, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced that Divija Bhimaraju, David Wen, Adrian Chu, Megan Huynh and Amy Jin, all grade 12, were recipients of corporate-sponsored scholarships in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition. This is the first round of awardees in this year’s program, and more winners will be announced over the next three months.
In September, 46 seniors – roughly 25 percent of the Class of 2018 – were named National Merit semifinalists, placing them in the top 1 percent nationwide among students who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in their junior year.
Last month, the American Association of Physics Teachers named Swapnil Garg ’18 one of 20 high school students nationwide who will contend for a spot on the United States Physics Team. Garg and the other candidates are currently completing a boot camp held at the University of Maryland, after which five students will be selected to represent the United States at the International Physics Olympiad, held in Lisbon, Portugal, from July 21-29.
Garg was one of 11 Harker students who qualified to take the United States Physics Olympiad (USAPhO) exam after scoring in the top 10 percent on a screening exam in January. The others were then-seniors (now graduates) Jimmy Lin, Neelesh Ramachandran and Shaya Zarkesh; juniors Timothy Chang, Kaushik Shivakumar and Katherine Zhang; sophomore Jeffrey Kwan; freshman Daniel Wang; and eighth graders David Dai and Rishab Parthasarathy. Of those, Kwan, Parthasarathy and Zarkesh each won a bronze medal, and Dai and Shivakumar received an honorable mention.
Four Harker students joined five other team members for the local USA Ultimate championship tournament. Harker students Brian Harder, Athreya Daniel, Johnathan Mo, all grade 7, and Leah Harder, grade 4, participated. The Bay Area Disc Association hosts an annual tournament in California for kids ages 10-14; this year the tournament was in Newark. There are no preliminary games; the teams train all season for the big event, and the work paid off for these students!
In the Division II finals, the team edged out its opponent, Redwood Day School, beating it 8-6 to take home the championship trophy. A total of 24 middle school teams competed, evenly split between Division I and Division II. Teams competed from as far south as San Luis Obispo and as far north as Marin.
The students send out a special thanks to teacher Rebecca Williams for being the faculty sponsor for their after-school Ultimate club at the middle school. The club activity was instrumental in allowing Harker’s competitors to play together and work on skills throughout the year. The team is coached by Alan Harder, father of Brian and Leah, who has played at the club level for more than 15 years. With three seventh graders on the team, it will be exciting to see if they can defend their title next year!
Congratulations to grade 1 chess enthusiast Rohan Rajaram, who last month won the K-1 championship at the National Elementary Championship in Nashville. It was the latest in a series of strong performances for Rajaram, who also won his section at the Susan Polgar Foundation National Open that same month, and in April placed in the top 15 among K-3 students at the CalChess State Scholastic Championship.
At this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), held May 14-18 in Pittsburgh, juniors Anjay Saklecha and Krish Kapadia were grand award winners, receiving a fourth place award of $500 for their project, “UCH-L1 and s100B in Saliva as Novel Biomarkers for Severe Traumatic Brain Injury,” in the translational medical science category. The pair also won first place and $750 from the Air Force Research Laboratory. Also successful was junior Cameron Jones, who received a fourth place award in the physics and astronomy category for his project, titled “Automated Identification and Inference of Organic Molecular Structure and Relative Concentrations from Infrared Spectral Data.”
The students qualified for Intel ISEF after receiving grand prizes at the 2018 Synopsys Science & Technology Championship in March. About 1,800 high school students from around the world showcase their research each year at the event, which is the world’s largest science fair for pre-college students, millions of whom participate in local science fairs to earn a chance to appear at Intel ISEF.
Consumer website Varesha.com ran an interesting article about leasing clothing in India, which included a big section on PromElle, the prom dress leasing app by Harker juniors Nishka Ayyar and Riya Gupta.
A number of articles celebrating the 2018 Presidential Scholars were published in numerous media. Harker’s Jacqueline He, grade 12, was named a Presidential Scholar for the Arts this year.
Palo Alto Online wrote a nice article that included Enid Davis, former director of libraries at Harker. Davis has written lyrics for the play, “A New Style of Jeans,” using songs in the popular domain. The show was performed in early June at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
NBC interviewed Harker student Prameela Kottapalli, grade 11, about her winning essay entered in the “Growing Up Asian In America” contest. She was interviewed on NBC’s Asian Pacific America with Robert Handa.
In late May, CareerConnect hosted an Excel workshop led by Juston Glass, business and entrepreneurship teacher. He spoke to about 15 students on how to properly use Excel for organizational purposes, finding the averages of data with specific conditions and formulating equations for financial-based projects. At the workshop, students also were given a list of 20 easy tips and tricks to help them maneuver around the spreadsheet software.
Students learned about the importance of Excel in the business field and received tips on how to use the software. Glass noted he uses Excel nearly daily, and gave multiple scenarios in which the program is necessary, such as in real-estate or in owning any type of business. Elaine Zhai, grade 9, who had never used Excel, noted “we learned about sorting data and a lot of tricks that would make using Excel easier in the future” Overall, the event was a big success and many students enjoyed the opportunity to learn how to use Excel.