2019

This year during the summer I participated in Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) hosted by Imperial College London in the Mathematics Department,where I was supervised by Seth Flaxman. I worked on the interpretability of convolutional neural networks and developed an algorithm to quantify their weight on the final classification of the inputs (preprint to come, with the collaboration of Esra Suel). Here is the Google Collaboratory notebook I developed with explanations and Python code for helping interpret and understand convolutional neural networks, which also includes our research results and the PCACE algorithm. This project was awarded the UROP prize for outstanding research by Imperial College Mathematics Department. We later published the paper in the Responsible AI and DeepSpatial workshops at KDD 2021. You can find it on arXiv here.

During the fall semester I was a Course Assistant for the class Math 1b: Calculus, Series, and Differential Equations (the undergraduate single variable Calculus class at Harvard), where I helped the students during class, held office hours at the Math Question Center, and graded their homework.

During the fall semester I became a Research Assistant for Damián Blasi at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where we surveyed and coded SOTA methods for word embedding dictionaries’ definitions to study the emerging semantics from these spaces and variations across linguistical families. We published it in the Findings of ACL, 2021. Here you can find the paper on arXiv, and here you can find the accompanying code.

I was named Harvard College Scholar (awarded to top 10% of class).

I joined the Mozart Society Orchestra (where I play the violin). Here are the videos of our fall concert. I also played the flute in the pit for the First-Year Musical (Cruising Altitude), an original musical ran by first-year students. Here is a complete recording of Cruising Altitude. As part of my coursework in History of Science, here is a dialog on natural history and race, and here is an essay about the necessary public funding of science. Picture with the Cruising Altitude orchestra. Here is the complete video of the Judas Maccabaeus Oratorio by Handel that we played with the Harvard Baroque Orchestra and the Harvard University Choir.

Finally, I took several classes that I enjoyed a lot. I discovered the field of Theoretical Computer Science with CS 124 (Algorithms and Data Structures) with Jelani Nelson and CS 121 (Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science) with Boaz Barak. I will be a Teaching Fellow for CS 124 during the spring semester 2020 with Michael Mitzenmacher. I was also very lucky to learn Set Theory (and some philosophy) in a small seminar led by Hugh Woodin and Peter Koellner.