By Benjamin Hong, Co-Editor in Chief
As the school year draws to a close, so too does the work of Hawks enrolled in River Hill’s Independent Research I class. In this program, students learn how to pursue an original research project in a field of their own choosing throughout the year, developing innovative and novel results in their respective fields in connection with subject-matter experts. It serves as an initial foray into the world of high-level academic research and provides students with a unique opportunity to not only dive deep into subjects they are passionate about but also to give back to the communities they care about.
An integral part of the research process is a real-world product, presented to an audience that can best benefit from the researcher’s work. At River Hill, student researchers have begun executing their personalized products to demonstrate the value that their year of hard work can bring to the communities they hope to serve.
One such researcher is Advik Rai, a sophomore who has spent the year delving into how music impacts the human brain and the ways it can be harnessed in healthcare settings. His selection of this topic was primarily driven by his lifelong connection to music, having, as he put it, “been surrounded by, performing, and composing my own music since my formative years, through piano, guitar and digital production tools.” While his research paper employed a survey to explore how demographic and behavioral factors impacted a given individual’s music preferences, going forward Rai aims higher, stating that “lots of studies show that the capacity to which [medications] act on people’s brains is only strengthened by music. Human-made music usually doesn’t have the extreme precision of features needed in medicine, which is where predictive algorithms could step in.”
Long term, Rai’s plans involve creating, as he put it, “an algorithmic music-generating software that uses facial expression to generate music in real-time to help patients.” He has already begun planning to make this dream of generating medically optimal music into reality. He has spent the past month developing a website to showcase a prototype of his software and will be interning and working with Dr. Alexander Pantelyat, the founder and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine, to further his involvement with the field.
Another promising researcher is sophomore Christopher Austin, who has spent the year gaining deeper insights into computer vision, particularly with respect to technologies that would allow computers to take into account the context of a given scenario during object detection. He stated that what initially drew him to the topic was how “unmachinelike” the field of computer vision is. He described it as developing “the capability that a human has in robot form.”
Christopher’s work centered around finding methods to improve the efficacy of state-of-the-art machine learning models, which he was able to accomplish, as he described it, “by a small amount, though at the cost of speed.” He hopes to continue his work going into next year, envisioning eventually “integrating my work into the software used today in self-driving cars,” as their eventual inevitability means “improving their safety is critical.”
The work of sophomore John Willets, another first-time researcher in the program, may be the most ambitious of all the independent study projects. He has dedicated his year of research to improving the fuel efficiency and carbon footprint of commercial aircraft, which stemmed from his self-stated ambition to “become a pilot and aerospace engineer.” He developed a design that blends the wings and body of the aircraft into a continuous surface as his culminating product, which he hopes to eventually propose to aviation industry experts. He hopes that in implementation this design will be used in conjunction with “highly efficient engines with high bypass ratios and intercoolers to decrease carbon emissions even further.”
The research careers of these students are still in their infancy, but their achievements thus far are undeniably remarkable. And despite the name of the program, the effects of the work being conducted in the Independent Research classes by these nascent researchers are more than just individual achievements. Rather, all the various projects being undertaken represent as a whole the collective potential of the next generation of leaders. These students and their work speak to the broader innovative culture River Hill fosters, setting up the next generation of trailblazers and thinkers to make a genuine, positive, and lasting impact on our world.