Last weekend, the Harker Research Symposium welcomed attendees to the upper school campus for the first time since 2019. This annual celebration of the sciences, organized by the students of Women in STEM, invites the Harker community to view presentations and hear talks by Harker students and experts in a variety of fields, as well as get a glance at the exciting innovations on the horizon.
In her morning welcome address, science department chair and symposium founder Anita Chetty remarked that more than 60 poster presentations were being given by Harker middle and upper school students, a new record for the event. Attendees spent much of the day perusing the spaces in the athletic center and Rothschild Performing Arts Center where the presentations were being hosted.
The theme of this year’s symposium, “STEM Will Save Us,” dealt with the many ways that STEM disciplines are responding to current and upcoming challenges. Kamini Varma, VP of genetic testing solutions R&D at Thermo Fisher, was the first morning keynote speaker. Her talk, titled “The COVID-19 Diaries,” covered her experience during the COVID-19 pandemic working in molecular diagnostics. It was a project that began not long after shelter-in-place orders were enacted, which Varma described as feeling like a diary or book. “I started to put together the COVID-19 diaries actually in April of 2020, when I was asked to present a talk, she said. “I had no clue that two years later, we would still be adding new chapters.”
Artificial intelligence was a major topic at this symposium, with Helm.ai demonstrating its self-driving software outside Nichols Hall for much of the day, while Harker’s AI Club gave a presentation on ethical and unethical uses of AI in the present and beyond. Also discussing this topic was the second morning keynote speaker, Yanbing Li, senior VP of engineering at Aurora, developers of the Aurora Driver self-driving system that has vehicles in testing in the Bay Area, Pittsburgh and Dallas. “Self-driving technology has been the pursuit of our generation,” she said. “It always feels so close, but it also feels still far away.” Li’s presentation covered the ways Aurora’s technology is addressing safety concerns while also bringing self-driving technology closer to being a fully realized commercial product.
At a special alumni panel, Steven Botte ‘82, Ashley Morishige ‘07 (via Zoom), Amy Rorabaugh ‘10, Simar Bajaj ‘20, Daniza Rodriguez ‘13, Jasmine Wiese ‘20 and Allison Sommers ’21 covered important topics in diversity, equity and inclusion, including changes that must be made in corporate culture to increase diversity, how the Harker community helped and supported them in affirming their identities and what improvements the community can make for a more equitable environment. Each of the panelists were given the opportunity to talk at length about their unique experiences and how to approach conversations about race, sexuality and gender identity.
Senan Ebrahim ’08 and Hassaan Ebrahim ’11, this year’s alumni keynote speakers, gave a presentation on their journey to co-founding Hikma Health, a nonprofit that provides free health data systems to organizations providing health care to refugees. Their path included partnerships with groups around the world and engaging with their network to find people who could help build the technology. The primary goal of Hikma Health is to provide readily accessible and up-to-date information to clinicians so that they can offer refugees “the kind of personalized care that they truly deserve as compared to what we had been observing routinely on the ground,” Senan said.
Throughout the day, guests visited the exhibitor area where companies including Google, Nvidia and Microsoft demonstrated some of their products. They also made their way to the Nichols Hall rotunda, where several stations of fun activities were set up for the younger science enthusiasts in attendance.
The first afternoon keynote speaker was Hari Mix, assistant professor of environmental studies and sciences at Santa Clara University and an experienced climber with a total of five months on Mt. Everest. Mix surveyed the various environmental, social and economic changes that have been brought to the area around Mt. Everest, as well as possible solutions to the problems posed by human waste and climate change, including those that have affected the people indigenous to the area of Nepal where the mountain stands. Mix, whose current goal is to reach the summit of Mt. Everest without the assistance of supplemental oxygen, advised the students in the audience to learn to appreciate the journey. “My lesson for The Harker School students today is to really focus on the process more than the achievement or the outcome,” he said.
Speaking last for the day was Upendra Mardikar, chief security officer at Snap Finance, who advised guests on how to be “Cyber Smart,” summarizing the different types of security risks presented by the growing presence of smart devices in our daily lives. These include threats from online predators, cyberbullying and the acquisition and sale of personal information. He also discussed some proper and improper ways to respond to these risks. Despite the many threats people should be cognizant of, Mardikar advised caution, not panic. “The idea is not to scare you,” he said. “Don’t be scared, just be careful.”
Last week, 21 students were recognized in the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s (NCWIT) 2022 Award for Aspirations in Computing. This award recognizes “women, genderqueer or non-binary students for their computing-related achievements and interests, and encourages them to pursue their passions,” according to the NCWIT website. Students (all of them in grades 9-12) enter by submitting an application containing essay and multiple-choice questions.
Senior Alice Feng and juniors Ashley Hu, Ella Lan, Nidhya Shivakumar, Deeya Viradia, Sabrina Zhu and Sally Zhu all won National Honorable Mentions – the second-highest tier of award – and were all regional Affiliate Winners. Senior Alina Yuan was named an Affiliate Winner. Amiya Chokhawala, Amrita Pasupathy and Ariya Reddy, all grade 11; Ella Yee, grade 10; and ninth graders Melody Yin and Sophia Zhu each won an Affiliate Honorable Mention. Junior Michelle Jin, sophomores Harshini Chaturvedula, Claire Luo and Saloni Shah, and ninth graders Ainslie Chen, Chiling Han and Kashish Priyam were named Affiliate Rising Stars.
Last month, seniors Harsh Deep, Rishab Parthasarathy and William Zhao and juniors Jeremy Ko and Nicholas Wei took second place out of 30 teams at Virtual Regional Science Bowl, held at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The team lost a close round to Lynbrook, by the points equivalent of a single question.
This yearly competition, held by the U.S. Department of Energy, has students answering questions from a variety of fields, including chemistry, biology, physics and math. Harker also took second place at last year’s event.
Yesterday, juniors Deeya Viradia and Nidhya Shivakumar and sophomore Ella Lan were named winners of an Award for Aspirations in Computing by the National Center for Women and Information Technology. They were among 360 nationwide honorable mentions (the second-highest tier in the competition) selected from this year’s 3,500 applicants, who were judged on their activities, experience, leadership and how they planned to continue their careers after high school.
This morning, the Society for Science announced that senior Rishab Parthasarathy is among the top 40 finalists in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search, one of the country’s most prestigious high school science competitions. His research project was among the more than 1,800 submitted for this year’s contest, and has earned him a $25,000 prize as well as the eligibility to win one of the top 10 prizes – ranging from $40,000 to $250,000 – that will be awarded at the end of a weeklong competition held in March. Winners are scheduled to be announced on March 15. Earlier this month, Parthasarathy and five other Harker students were named Regeneron STS top 300 scholars.
Last week, two manuscripts co-authored by Simar Bajaj ‘20 were published in medical journals Nature Medicine and The Lancet. The Nature Medicine piece covered the widespread attempts to suppress voting rights and why medical professionals “champion patients’ right to vote to protect health and deracinate inequitable medical practices, building on the efforts of organizations such as Vot-ER and VoteHealth 2020.” The piece, by Bajaj and co-authors and medical doctors Alister Francois Martin and Fatima Cody Stanford, details why protecting voting rights is a health issue and therefore needs the support of health care professionals.
For The Lancet, Bajaj, Dr. Stanford and Lucy Tu published a piece on the historical and continued racism and misogyny faced by Black women medical professionals, including the outsized scrutiny and expectations placed upon them. “Black women physicians are simultaneously considered superhuman, but never enough. We suggest this double bind leads to a sense of disquietude as Black women’s identity conflicts with their success,” the authors argue. They go on to express support for measures such as implementing diversity, equity and inclusion work as a requirement for promotion.
Yesterday, rising eighth grader Danielle Steinbach was named a finalist in the 2021 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Steinbach’s project explored how to improve the accuracy of diagnosing and treating neurological disorders and brain diseases using neural networks. Students who enter the competition each create a video explaining their solution to a current scientific problem. Finalists are awarded $1,000 and are invited to take part in a summer mentorship program with a 3M scientist. The grand prize winner will receive $25,000 and a two-day, one-night trip. The final event is scheduled to take place at 3M’s headquarters in Saint Paul, Minn., in October.
Several teams of Harker students received recognition at this year’s Tech Challenge, held by The Tech Interactive in San Jose. Each year, the Tech Challenge invites students in grades 4-12 to use engineering skills to solve a real-life problem. This year’s task was to use recycled cardboard to create a useful appliance that could transform into another useful appliance. Because this year’s Tech Challenge was held virtually, teams showed their work for judges at a virtual showcase.
Nicholas Knauer, Ameera Ramzan, Adrian Roufas and Chelsea Xie, the sixth graders who made up team Yes We CAAN, won the Outstanding Overall award for creating a cat playhouse that could also be repurposed into an organizer for books and writing utensils.
Team RASA – an acronym made with the first initials of fifth graders Riya Chadha, Abby Heinlein, Sofe Jalil and Augusta Chen – went a similar route, creating a school supplies organizer that could be converted into a cat house. Their work won them the Judges’ Choice award for Outstanding Presentation.
Fifth graders Christian Choi, Matthew Lee and Andrew Pangborn – who competed as Team MAC n Cheese – won the Outstanding Engineering Design Process award for their creation of a small desk that could be converted into a trash can. They were also finalists in the video contest.
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.”
Raji Swaminathan, middle school science teacher, recently published the third book in her series about the elements, titled “The Halogens – Oh, So Reactive!” As with the previous two books, this book follows Atom and her dog, Electron, as they travel to visit the elements via a magic periodic table. The book is currently available to purchase through Amazon and will be available to download for free on April 5-6. The second book in the series will be available for free March 25-28 and April 5-6. Swaminathan’s other two books, “Hydrogen and the Alkali Metals” and “My Basketball Game – A Lesson about Accuracy and Precision,” are available as free downloads through Apple Books.