Blog posts

2024

Experimentation with N-Queens and Monte Carlo

18 minute read

Published:

If you have a chessboard, how can you place 8 queens so that none of them are attacking each other? For a board of size N, this is the N-queens problem. We could solve this directly through recursive backtracking; however, I want to see how well we could do with a pure sampling-based approach. Can we treat this “constraint satisfaction” problem as a sampling problem, where the target probability distribution is \(0\) for any boards with attacking queens, and non-zero for “satisfying” boards? For REALLY big boards, sampling-based approaches might be more efficient at finding boards that are nearly optimal.

Robotics Exploration

40 minute read

Published:

I had the opportunity to work with some of the UVA Collaborative Robotics lab’s robots throughout my second semester. I followed several research directions, as I learned about various components of robotic learning.

Detecting Opps (Opponents in Autonomous Vehicles Race)

8 minute read

Published:

Our team is working to incorporate computer vision as an object tracking modality. We’re using a YOLOv5 model to do this, and the most difficult part has been to collect data. We use a semi-automated pipeline to achieve a high quantity of data through auto-labeling, without sacrificing on quantity.

2023

Sparse Autoencoder

18 minute read

Published:

What kinds of useful features can we extract from images?

2022

Sound Camera

37 minute read

Published:

This is a year-long research project I conducted as a high-school senior at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.