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.

Patrick Zhou, signing off.