High School

Meet Our New Subject Expert Teacher, Ms. Prachi Agarwal

June 11, 2026 by nathanielyinger Leave a Comment

With over 19 years of experience in education, Ms. Prachi is a dedicated educator and lifelong learner committed to fostering engaging, meaningful, and student-centered learning experiences that inspire curiosity, confidence, and academic growth. Ms. Prachi has worked across diverse educational settings in India and the United States as a classroom teacher.

Ms. Prachi holds the following degrees: Master of Education, Bachelor of Education, Bachelor of Science in Biology, and Bachelor of Law and postgraduate diplomas in Personnel Management.

Ms. Prachi believes learning is most powerful when it is inquiry-driven, engaging, and meaningful, and strives to create inclusive classrooms where students feel supported, challenged, and encouraged to think critically, collaborate, and grow in confidence.

Ms. Prachi views education as a continuous journey of growth for both students and educators, and she is committed to fostering a positive learning environment where every child feels valued and empowered. She believes that education is a transformative tool that fosters meaningful change and growth in society as well as within the community.

Outside the classroom, Ms. Prachi enjoys music, reading, and cooking.

What drew you to join our school community?
I was drawn to BASIS Independent Dublin because of its unique academic model that blends rigor, depth of understanding, and a culture of inquiry. I deeply connect with the idea of challenging students not just to learn content, but to think critically, question deeply, and engage meaningfully with their learning.

What are you most excited about in your first year at BASIS Independent Dublin?
I am most excited about building strong relationships with my students and creating a classroom environment where curiosity, confidence, and critical thinking can thrive. I look forward to designing engaging learning experiences that connect classroom learning to the real world, and to contributing positively to the school community.

What advice do you give to students who want to succeed in your class?
My advice to students is to approach learning with curiosity and enthusiasm, and to truly enjoy the process of discovering new ideas. Learning becomes most meaningful when you are actively involved—asking questions, exploring concepts deeply, and connecting what you learn to the world around you.

What do you hope students will remember most about your class in the future?
I hope students remember my classroom as a very happy place where they felt safe, supported, and encouraged to grow both academically and personally. Beyond that, I hope they leave with a strong conceptual understanding of what they learned and the confidence to use that knowledge in new and real-world situations.

BASIS Independent Dublin is a Grades 5 – 12 private school, providing students with an internationally benchmarked liberal arts and sciences curriculum, with advanced STEM offerings. Considering joining the BASIS Independent Dublin community? To join our interest list for the next school year and receive admissions updates and more, please click here.

Term Project Spotlight: Exploring Creativity Through Glass Blowing and Fusing

June 5, 2026 by ezekielbracamonte Leave a Comment

What happens when students step outside the traditional classroom and into a glass studio? In this hands-on Term Project, students in grades 9–11 explored the art and science of glass through both on-campus creation and real-world experience.

Students spent the week working with both hot and cold glass, discovering new techniques and pushing their creativity in exciting ways. On campus, they practiced glass fusion by designing their own pieces, cutting cold glass, and firing their work in a kiln. These projects ranged from detailed pendants to larger glass scenes, each one showcasing careful planning and artistic expression. As Max P. shared, the experience offered “so much creative liberty,” giving students the freedom to explore their own ideas while building new skills.

The experience extended beyond campus with a visit to the Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI), where students worked with hot glass reaching temperatures of nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. With guidance from professional instructors, they rotated, blew, and shaped molten glass to create their own bowls. Students selected their preferred shapes and colors, watching as clear glass was rolled in vibrant frit—small pieces of colored glass—before being transformed into one-of-a-kind pieces. Reflecting on the experience, Rachel Van Dusen summed it up simply: “It blew me away.”

Over the course of the project, each student completed at least three pieces: a blown glass bowl, a small fused pendant, and a larger fused design. Along the way, they gained not only technical skills, but also a deeper appreciation for the medium. As teacher Sarah Hetu noted, “This Term Project brought students a great respect for working with glass—we truly learned that challenging mediums give us the most rewarding work.”

Beyond the techniques, students valued the opportunity to collaborate, create, and enjoy the process together. Mansi S. shared that the project allowed her to “be productive and have fun with my friends and teachers,” while Ximo (George) T. added that he “would definitely do it again.” For some, the impact was lasting—Olivia X. reflected, “Glass blowing changed my life.”

The week concluded with a Glass Showcase, where students proudly displayed their creations for families and staff to enjoy, celebrating all they had learned and accomplished.

From first cuts of cold glass to shaping molten material in the studio, this Term Project gave students a unique opportunity to explore creativity in a completely new medium—one that challenged them, inspired them, and left a lasting impression.

BASIS Independent Silicon Valley is a TK – Grade 12 private school, providing students with an internationally benchmarked liberal arts and sciences curriculum, with advanced STEM offerings. Considering joining the Bobcat community? To join our interest list for the next school year and receive admissions updates and more, please click here.

Global Finance And Fearless Curiosity Collide: Brookfield Investors Visit Our Upper School

May 29, 2026 by christineklayman Leave a Comment

What happens when some of the world’s leading institutional investors step inside an NYC private school powered by fearless, independent thinking?

[Read more…]

Meet Our New Dean of Students: Mr. Alexander Seto

May 27, 2026 by nathanielyinger Leave a Comment

Mr. Seto holds an MA in Counseling Psychology from Yorkville University and BA from The University of Western Ontario. Originally from Toronto, Canada, he is a Registered Psychotherapist and Canadian Certified Counselor. He has spent the past six years at St. Andrew’s College, a leading independent boarding school, where he served as the school’s first full-time counselor and a student and staff wellness leader, working with students across grades 5 through 12.

Mr. Seto believes effective student support is holistic and relationship-driven. Students thrive in communities that foster a genuine sense of belonging and are provided the structures, resources, and opportunities that support their growth. At St. Andrew’s, he worked across all of these areas, providing direct individual support, building programs, coaching teams, and organizing student and staff events.

Mr. Seto joins BASIS Independent Dublin as a founding member and looks forward to being part of a community that is just beginning to take shape. Outside of work he enjoys spending time with his wife, competing in squash, playing chess, and staying active.

What inspired you to work in schools, and what drew you to the BASIS Independent Dublin community?

I have spent the past six years at St. Andrew’s College, a leading independent boarding school in Canada, and have come to appreciate the impact a positive school environment can have. Beyond academics, schools are a place where students figure out what they are good at, where friendships form, and where they are exposed to opportunities they might not have found anywhere else. Supporting students through that and being part of the programming and planning behind it is work I find genuinely meaningful.

With BASIS Independent Dublin being in its founding year, I look at this as an opportunity to create a supportive, student-centered culture. I am looking forward to being part of building a school where students have a strong sense of belonging and can thrive.

How would you describe your approach to student support and engagement?

Approachability and consistency are two things I prioritize when working with students. Students should know they can come to you regardless of what they are dealing with, and this involves having the right structures and resources in place so that when they do, there is something meaningful to offer. Support works best when it is accessible for a variety of needs.

My background as a counselor and clinician shapes a lot of how I work with students. I approach conversations with patience and without judgment, and I try to understand what is going on underneath the surface rather than responding only to what is immediately visible. From there the focus becomes identifying what supports and resources can genuinely help, and making sure students and families know what is available to them.

What aspect(s) of your new role are you most excited about?

I am looking forward to establishing relationships with students and families at BASIS Independent Dublin as we all head into its founding year, understanding what this community needs, and building the kind of support structures that can grow with the school over time.

Senior Project Spotlight: Aarohi G. Weeks 9 – 10

May 27, 2026 by mirandamartinez Leave a Comment

The Senior Project is an independent, student-led culmination of our high school experience. After three years of academic preparation, our seniors are ready to spend the last trimester of their high school careers applying the skills and knowledge they have gained to develop a project that is insightful, academically rigorous, and professional in nature. This year, we are proud to showcase a senior from one of our neighboring campuses, BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, Aarohi G.

Week 9: Second Stages

This week, my priority continues to be wrapping up my work with civics education requirements and on-campus polling. Results and progress on this front will come next week two, as I wrap up with analysis that keeps high-schoolers and non-voting methods of participation in mind.

Civics Education

To study civics education, I chose to see if there was a correlation between states’ requirements and their average voter turnout over the timeframe of 2014 to 2024. To do this, I first compiled the data from a study by Craiutu and Ngalande titled “State Civics Requirements In 2024.” This article detailed the states that participated in each combination of civics course and test (ex. no course and no test, no course and test not required to pass, etc.)

Then, I found the average voter turnout for each state and created a heatmap showing, as a scale which combinations corresponded to the least and highest voter turnout.

On-Campus Polling

The states selected for this study appeared neither in SDVR or AVR lists, to remove possibility of impact from these legislations. As manually entering the data proved to be the only option, I began for the first three states on the list. Using the College Scorecard dataset, which contains comprehensive details on each college in the U.S., I clustered similar colleges by factors like tuition, acceptance rate, and type (private, for-profit, non-profit, etc.).

From these clusters, I paired the most similar colleges within the state, where one college was a treatment university found in the list offering on-campus polling sites, and the other is a control. Finally, I affirmed each college’s validity to belong within their own clusters by calculating their silhouette score (colorcoded indicating green as very reliable, yellow as fairly reliable, and red is unreliable).

For the next week, I’ll be tackling the second step to this analysis: comparing the number of registered voters in each college in the pair. To do this, I’ll be accessing the college’s NSLVE reports. While some are easily found online, and colleges who participate are found on a website called All In Challenge, that website often allows colleges to hide their reports from public view. So, for those that I cannot find online, I’ll be reaching out to All In representatives for the reports, as suggested on the website.

Week 10: Forward Steps

This week, I got to make major improvements to my process for studying on-campus polling sites that will help me wrap up this stage.

As we discussed last week, my two main sources for this section of the project were Voter Friendly Campus and College Scorecard. The first offers a list of the voter-friendly campuses per state that offer a polling site in two-school-year intervals. The states I chose, which never had Same Day or Automatic Voter Registration, were Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina. College Scorecard offers comprehensive information on each U.S. college, which I used to determine the most similar pairs of control and treatment colleges.

Now, I increased the number of parameters used to judge whether two colleges were similar, now being able to determine the size of colleges (to avoid comparing very big colleges to small ones) and separate community colleges from 4-year institutions.

When making the new pairs, I included both of their individual silhoutte scores (determining how well they belonged in their own college groups) and their match distance (how closely the two colleges were related to each other). This two-method approach ensures I picked the best pairs. From there, I chose the best from each state.

Now the challenge was one that I had discussed last week, finding the voter registration counts within each college. It’s the best way to see real effects of polling sites. To do this, I was searching the internet for each college’s NSLVE reports, where they disclose information like this.

And while a lot of these pairs can’t be counted because their information isn’t online, the ones that can will be the specific case studies I’ll focus on in my final analysis. It seems like an inevitable limitation of studying on-campus polling sites.

So while finding the data for this wasn’t as straightforward as some other variables I studied, I’m glad I can still move forward.

BASIS Independent Dublin is a Grades 6 – 12 private school, providing students with an internationally benchmarked liberal arts and sciences curriculum, with advanced STEM offerings. Considering joining the BASIS Independent Dublin community? To join our interest list for the next school year and receive admissions updates and more, please click here.

Senior Project Spotlight: Patrick Z. Weeks 9 – 10

May 26, 2026 by mirandamartinez Leave a Comment

Week 9: Lifting the Paper Weight

Hi everyone and welcome to Week 9 of my senior project blog! This entire week has been spent working on scientific communication. I drafted the full research paper, which was as mentally taxing as debugging my quantum circuits. I used the noise sweep experiment results to draw conclusions using principles of entanglement and superposition, and made sure to explain the theoretical advantages of quantum neural networks without overusing complex TensorFlow codes. The majority of my time was actually spent aligning my references to perfection, in ACS format, and trying to fix the problem of not having enough bolded years or italicized volume numbers.

As soon as the paper was done, I started planning out visuals for my Senior Project Exhibition. Transforming a large scientific paper into an attractive poster and a compelling presentation involves many different challenges. I decided to start with designing my poster and its hierarchy. I put the circuit architecture side by side with a graph of the model breaking down under Additive White Gaussian Noise: a visual contrast intended to help my audience grasp my argument. In parallel, I started outlining my presentation slides so that I could tell a clear story from my eureka moment about how qubits are disrupting cryptography and leading to accurate traffic light classification models.

Doing all this work, an even bigger revelation came to me: Commit Day is coming on Friday! It’s crazy how, while discussing the future of quantum computing, I’m about to finalize my own plans for college. It’s incredible how close we are to graduation, and working on this project makes me realize how everything is ending. This process is pretty emotional, but it’s amazing how everything is falling into place. Next week, I’m going to concentrate on rehearsing my speech and finishing the last touches of my interactive web app demo.

Week 10: Pixels and Practice

Hello, and welcome back to Week 10 of my senior project blog! With Commit Day finally behind me, a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I now have the freedom to focus fully on preparing for my capstone exhibition. This week’s major victory has definitely been completing my presentation slides, and the primary hurdle I had to overcome has been ensuring that I don’t bore my audience to death with dry TensorFlow metrics and technicalities. Instead, I decided to craft a compelling narrative: a story of classical AI’s inability to cope with the chaos inherent to real-life data, such as blurry dashcam footage, and how QNN entanglement acts as a natural buffer against errors.

While crafting my presentation, I have also been busy working on my exhibition poster. I am almost finished with it, but one final element still needs some work. At the moment, I find myself struggling immensely with the visual hierarchy, specifically placing two contrasting sets of clear, static-filled traffic light images precisely next to the degradation curves to highlight the difference in performance between my QNN and its classical counterpart. With only a couple more tweaks to the poster design, it’ll be ready for printing.

I worked hard to make sure my visual deliverables look great. However, the true horror of capstone presentations is finally dawning on me. I actually have to verbalize and explain all of this content within a limited time to a live audience. While playing with circuit designs in Google Colab is certainly much more relaxing than presenting them aloud, I will be doing the latter next week.

The Evolution of Lab Sciences: From Exploration in Primary Years to Advanced Laboratory Experiences in High School

May 22, 2026 by emilyhughes Leave a Comment

At BASIS Independent Bellevue, science comes to life through hands-on experiments, collaborative projects, and engaging investigations that encourage students to think critically and creatively. Across every division, from Primary School to High School, students are actively exploring the world around them in a variety of capacities.

Primary School: Building Curiosity Through Exploration

In Primary School, students are introduced to the wonders of science and engineering through engaging, project-based learning experiences. Throughout the primary years students deepen their knowledge of essential science concepts while teachers inspire a sense of wonder and excitement about the natural world, encouraging them to see themselves as young scientists ready to explore and discover.

In engineering classes, students explored various aspects of STEAM through units on civil and aerospace engineering. During the civil engineering unit, students worked collaboratively to design free-standing paper skyscrapers and environmentally informed cities centered around green spaces. In aerospace engineering, students designed rockets inspired by the Artemis II launch. During presentations, the BASIS Aeronautics Space Administration (B.A.S.A.) voted on the most innovative rocket design, with one winning all-girls team, impressing classmates by designing a rocket capable of cooking s’mores for astronauts during takeoff.

Students also participated in several exciting scientific investigations throughout the year. During a month-long moon phase project, students observed and documented the moon each night in moon journals before reenacting the positions of the Earth, moon, and sun to better understand lunar phases. Students also explored light energy through learning centers focused on how light travels and reflects off surfaces. Another favorite activity came during the measurement unit, where students practiced measuring liquids and following detailed lab instructions. If completed correctly, the experiment resulted in a colorful rainbow, making science both educational and exciting.

Middle School: Applying Science Through Hands-on Learning

Middle School students take scientific exploration to the next level through challenging labs, engineering projects, and interactive investigations. From grade 6–grade 8 students take three separate, concurrent science classes, biology, chemistry, and physics.

In physics classes, students participated in the “Egg War,” where they applied concepts such as Newton’s Laws, momentum, impulse, and kinematics to design vehicles capable of protecting an egg during a head-on collision. Students also explored electricity by building a variety of circuits using batteries, wires, and light bulbs, gaining firsthand experience with electrical systems and experimentation.

Engineering electives have also provided students with opportunities to collaborate and innovate. In grade 6 Introduction to Engineering, students worked together to build and code robots capable of competing in friendly robot battles. Through this project, students strengthened their skills in coding, construction, teamwork, and problem-solving.

Middle School chemistry students recently completed a stoichiometry lab involving a single replacement reaction between Copper (II) Sulfate and Aluminum. Students calculated theoretical yields, conducted the reaction, and analyzed their percent yield based on the copper produced. Biology students have also immersed themselves in the study of anatomy and life sciences through a variety of dissections, including cow hearts, cow eyes, frogs, and owl pellets. In addition, students explored the microscopic world by using microscopes to observe tissues, organisms, and cellular structures.

High School: Connecting Theory to Real-World Science

In high school science courses, students deepen their understanding of scientific concepts through advanced laboratory experiences and independent inquiry. In AP Physics 2, students conducted a capacitance lab in which they built parallel-plate capacitors using aluminum foil and textbooks. By testing how effectively paper functioned as a dielectric material, students were able to apply classroom equations to real-world experimentation and engineering design. In AP Physics 1, students got to build model trebuchets, a medieval siege engine powered by a counterweight. They explored the forces and torques acting on the system and how their design choices affected the range and accuracy of their models.

Honors and AP Chemistry students have also engaged in a wide variety of labs throughout the year, including titrations, acids and bases investigations, and experimental procedure design. Students are often challenged to create their own methods for achieving a scientific goal using only a provided set of materials, encouraging creativity and critical thinking in the lab. But what is the fun in chemistry without some fire? One particularly memorable experiment involved testing metals in flames to demonstrate properties of matter. By combining alcohol with different salts, students produced brilliantly colored flames that brought chemistry concepts vividly to life!

From designing rockets and building robots to conducting advanced chemistry and physics experiments, students across all grade levels are discovering that science is more than just a subject. It is an opportunity to explore, create, and innovate. Through these engaging lab experiences, our students continue to develop the problem-solving skills that will assist them in their future endeavors.

Celebrating the College Acceptance Results of BASIS Independent McLean’s Class of 2026

May 21, 2026 by aixuanwang Leave a Comment

On May 1, Decision Day, our seniors gathered for a barbecue and announced their college destinations. We are so proud of all of them and the hard work it took to get to this moment.

“Our seniors have so much to celebrate this year!” says Head of School Kate Reynolds. “The opportunities they have earned are a testament to their hard work and the support from our faculty and community. They have excelled in the classroom, in clubs, and in extracurriculars outside our walls, and they have left their mark on our community. We’re thrilled to see what they do next!”

The class of 2026’s hard work is reflected in some truly impressive statistics:

95% of our graduates were accepted to a top 50 school¹

70% of our graduates were accepted to a US News top 26 school

50% of our graduates were accepted to a US News top 25 school

23% were accepted into a school ranked in Times Higher Ed the global top 10

15% were accepted into a school ranked in the US News top 10

Here is an impressive list of schools where our students were accepted:

American
Amherst
Boston University
Cal Tech
Carnegie Mellon
Case Western
Cornell
Davidson
Duke
Emory
Georgetown
George Washington
Georgia Tech
Harvard
Johns Hopkins
McGill
NYU
Northeastern
Northwestern
Oxford
Purdue

Rice
St. John’s College
Stanford
Texas A&M
Virginia Tech
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of Florida
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Michigan
University of North Carolina
University of Pennsylvania
University of South Florida
University of Toronto
University of Virginia
University of Washington
Washington University in St. Louis
William & Mary

Most importantly, all of our seniors have worked hard to find a place that fits them and will help them grow and pursue their goals. As college counselor Mr. Ramsby notes:

“This class, BIM’s largest to date, succeeded remarkably in their college admission process. As you can see from the stats above, they achieved outstanding results from the schools they applied to. They were extremely thoughtful and deliberate in their college searches. By this fall, they will be scattered across the United States, from California to Boston, and also into Canada and the UK.”

Among many accolades our graduates received includes over $3 million in scholarship offers. Four students received full-ride scholarship offers, including the historic Morehead-Cain scholarship. Two students received National Merit scholarships, and one is a semifinalist for the Presidential Scholar award.

Our seniors took many different paths to these destinations. Some threw themselves into scientific research. Others competed in quiz bowl or debate. Others played sports or wrote poetry. We are proud of them all, and of the young adults they have become.

In the coming weeks, we will be sharing stories of our seniors’ journeys, from when they first arrived at BIM to where they are now. We do this to celebrate our seniors and to show our younger students and families that there are many different roads to success at our school and beyond.

Wherever our seniors go, BIM will always be a welcome place for them to come home to. We will miss them and wish them well as they begin this next phase of their lives!

Congratulations, Class of 2026!

¹ 92% were admitted to a US News & World Report top-50 school. The US News list does not include international schools, and we also had students admitted to Toronto (global #21) and McGill (global #41) in the Times Higher Education World University rankings. Every senior was accepted to a school ranked at least in the US News top 59.

BASIS Independent McLean is an Age 2–Grade 12 private school, providing students with an internationally benchmarked liberal arts and sciences curriculum, with advanced STEM offerings. Considering joining the Red-Tailed Hawks community? To join our interest list for the next school year and receive admissions updates and more, please click here.

Meet Our New Subject Expert Teacher: Mr. Andrew Ryan

May 13, 2026 by nathanielyinger Leave a Comment

Mr. Ryan brings a passion for teaching economics and mathematics that began in his own high school classroom. He has experience with a range of courses in our network from his time teaching for BASIS Independent Silicon Valley and BASIS Independent Manhattan. These include AP Macroeconomics, AP Macroeconomics, Capstone: Game Theory, and mathematics from Algebra I through Precalculus.

Mr. Ryan earned his Bachelor of Science in Economics with a Minor in History from Binghamton University in Upstate New York. During his undergraduate years, he tutored upper-level microeconomics to college students while also volunteering as a substitute teacher in a middle school. This dual experience shaped his goal of teaching his favorite subjects at a high level to motivated middle and high school students as they begin exploring specialized academic interests.

In his classroom, Mr. Ryan focuses on personal engagement through practice problems, experiments, and instructional games. He believes that students learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process. Outside of the classroom, Mr. Ryan enjoys running, listening to podcasts, and brainstorming new lesson plans, preferably all at the same time. He finds fulfillment in constantly seeking innovative and engaging ways to inspire his students.

Are there any highlights you’d like to share about your teaching philosophy or approach?
The core principles of my teaching philosophy are rooted in economics. When teaching opportunity cost, I introduce the tradeoffs inherent in the “endowment effect,” the human tendency to value something more once we own it. The endowment effect can be leveraged to the advantage of our students. We rarely overvalue the investment in our own human capital, that is, the investment in our own education. Consequently, I have consistently found that students learn best when they feel ownership over their learning. That ownership is the first meaningful step toward becoming a lifelong learner. My role is to create a healthy learning environment where that ownership is both natural and rewarding so that students continue to reinvest in themselves. That means lessons that are efficient, data-driven, and engaging. When course structures and expectations align with students’ goals, engagement rises.

What are some of the most rewarding parts of being a Subject Expert Teacher and working with BASIS Independent School students?
One of the most rewarding parts of being a Subject Expert Teacher is working with students who are genuinely curious and are capable of engaging with advanced material. Teaching within an accelerated curriculum allows for deeper conversations. Our students have more opportunities to push beyond procedural fluency and towards genuine conceptual understanding. I especially enjoy watching students as they begin recognizing when they are thinking ‘like economists’, questioning incentives, recognizing tradeoffs, and using marginal analytical reasoning. Watching my students develop confidence in their skills and intellectual independence has been incredibly fulfilling.

Are there any thoughts you’d like to share with families who are joining – or who are thinking of joining – the BASIS Independent Dublin community?
My aspiration is to share the confidence and excitement I have developed from joining the BASIS Independent Dublin team with our families. In my experience within the BASIS Independent network, I have been privileged to see how our strong academic framework can grow and mature over time as students and faculty work together. Being part of this flourishing institution has been deeply meaningful professionally and personally. One of the biggest draws for me to work at BASIS Independent Dublin has been the opportunity to support our school leadership in building a campus community from the ground up. I have faith in the tested success of our curriculum, our school leadership, and our amazing and growing staff.

Senior Project Spotlight: Patrick Z. Weeks 7 – 8

May 12, 2026 by mirandamartinez Leave a Comment

Week 7: The Noise Sweep

And here we are with a new entry in the series, right back from my Spring Break hiatus! The looming deadline for the final exhibition of this senior project looms far closer than I would like to admit at the moment. After trying to implement my very own fancy quantum circuit right up until the spring break started, and failing miserably, I decided to take a step back and start experimenting with putting external stress on my QNN instead of tinkering with the circuit design. So far, I’ve only been running simulations where the QNN and fair classical model compete in the face of a single level of AWGN noise. While that was enough to convince me that my hypothesis was correct, the true proof would come from watching the classical system fail as the noise increases.

For this week’s simulation run, I created a noise sweep test on Amazon SageMaker that progressively adds noise multipliers to the image of my traffic lights, starting from the slightest amount of fuzz all the way up to a full-blown whiteout of static on each of the images in my dataset, and then I ran those images through both networks. And guess what? Just as I hoped, the results showed a clear superiority of the quantum model even without any additional fancy modifications. At low noise levels, the QNN performed about the same as the fair CNN. However, once the noise multiplier grew above 3 or so, the performance of the classical model tanked, as the algorithm could no longer tell apart red from green because the pixel core got so corrupted by the added noise. On the contrary, the QNN degraded gracefully thanks to the fact that, since the qubits are entangled, they seem to evaluate the connection between all four pixels within the traffic light in their classification decision.

With this great progress made, my next task will be learning how to distill all these quantum physics equations into plain text for the discussion section of my research paper. Until next time!

Week 8: Frontend Magic, Backend Data

I must say, the euphoria of finally seeing your work compile successfully is pretty amazing, but sooner or later you have to step back from the coding process and actually explain it. Welcome back to my senior project week 8! I finally hung up the coder’s hat and donned the author’s hat. After experiencing a few adrenaline rushes during last week’s noise sweep experiment runs, I found myself staring at a blinking cursor with the task of actually writing a full-fledged research paper based on my results. Even though my results’ discussion and conclusion are not ready yet as I’m still processing the final batch of data, I’ve managed to do quite a bit of writing this week. First, I outlined my document in meticulous detail. Then, I carefully formatted my bibliography according to the ACS style guidelines. Finally, I edited both the Introduction and the Methodology chapters, so now I can proceed with my paper once I receive the final set of results.

While working on my paper, I realized one thing, there is no one other than researchers within my area of expertise who will want to look at a web page of nothing but raw TensorFlow code and console output screenshots. As the date of my senior capstone exhibition comes closer, it is time to stop caring about the process of creating models and start thinking hard about their audience reception. I need some sort of tangible way of presenting my theory to my potential readers. I decided I need an application which would allow me to show people first-hand the discrepancy in resistance of my models against static.

I have begun sketching the design of the website which would be used for my final demonstration. The main goal is to create an interface which would feature a slider where the audience would have to increase the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). As the level of static increases, graphs depicting my classical and quantum models’ behavior against the same exact static level would appear on my website screen. The viewer would experience firsthand the moment when the classical architecture fails while the quantum one stays stable and accurate. Besides this interactive website, I have been pondering over the layout of my physical exhibition poster, considering ways of including the architectural diagram of my quantum gates and the underlying logic behind them.