Allan’s Site

This isn’t about W and J.  W didn’t compete, and J didn’t qualify for CA.

It’s about me and a remarkable young man I met at the CA State Science Fair this year.

I’ve been judging at the CA State Science Fair for 6 years, including this year.  I’ve started volunteering to chair judging panels now, so my name is on some list of judging chairs, and this year, I was asked to chair the panel for Mathematical Sciences, Junior Division.  I told Gerrie Peters, who organizes the physical sciences categories, that I was looking forward to something different, beyond my usual physics and experimental focus.

The old Mathematics and Software category had grown too large in recent years, so last year it was split into Mathematical Sciences (MA) and Computational Systems and Analysis (CX), and the previous chair went with CX, while I was asked to chair MA.  Unfortunately, last year, there were still far more students in CX than in MA, and this year, the organizers attempted to rebalance the load by moving students working on neural networks and machine learning into MA, if their projects had a focus on theory rather than data.  However, the divisions weren’t always clear cut, some students asked to be reassigned back to CX, and all those requests were denied.  We chairs (in the Junior and Senior MA categories) were asked to accommodate the neural network or machine learning students, which I thought meant we had to expand judging beyond pure mathematics.  I informed my fellow judges by e-mail.

About four or five of our students (out of nine in total) stated in their abstracts that they used neural networks or machine learning in their projects, which was a bit of a relief to me, since I had dabbled extensively in neural networks as a hobby during my grad student years.  I had been worried that I’d be judging only pure mathematics, and although I’m no slouch when it comes to math, it’s not my specialty.  I’ve learned over the years that different sciences have different vocabularies, e.g. when astronomers talk about Be stars, they’re not talking about stars made of beryllium (which I — a physicist — thought for a split second (but only a split second because I know that Be is the rarest light element)) but rather stars in class B, subclass e (e for “emission”, referring to specific emission lines, usually one or more Balmer emission  lines).  The different scientific vocabularies are not a problem for me, but it does mean I have to learn the language, which means a little extra time and effort.  But with neural networks, at least I was on familiar ground.  Also, with only 9 students, we judges would have plenty of time to conduct interviews.

(Anthony and Phil were two of my co-judges, both from Aerospace.  I think Phil is in cybersecurity, and I’m not sure about Anthony, but I think he’s a manager.  Tom, our other co-judge, is an engineer at a company I don’t remember, but he hasa strong interest in pure math.)

So, after meeting and getting to know each other, briefly, and after introducing ourselves to the students yesterday, we started our interviews at 8:30 AM.  I got through 6 interviews by 10:30 AM, which was our break time.  While I was impressed by one or two students, including a student who did a mathematical “proof” (really a demonstration) of Pappus’ Theorem using circle inversion and a Javascript program, as well as a student who used a neural network (as well as other methods, including logistic regression) to study the progression of Alzheimers’ through a 7 year database of Alzheimers patients (in order to predict Alzheimers progression and allow for earlier treatment), the thing I noticed about almost all of the neural network projects is that the students treated neural networks as a black box.  In fact, I think only one or two wrote their own neural network code, while most downloaded NN code or used NN code built into some Python libraries.  In my opinion, NN code isn’t hard to write — just formulate the mathematics as linear algebra and write simple code to do the multiplication and back-propagation.  In IDL, it takes less than a page of code; in Python, it might take a page, maybe less.  And even if the student doesn’t write the code himself or herself, I think it’s important that he or she knows what’s going on under the hood.  If a student uses a big software package, like GEANT or GALPROP or any number of biophysics packages, then it’s okay not to know the underlying code or mechanisms, because the packages are simply far too big and complicated.  But NN’s are simple, so they should know.  (The student who did the Alzheimers project did seem to know his stuff for NN’s, at least better than the other students.)

As we were going on break, Phil caught me and said “I think I’ve got a problem with project 7.  That one is way over my head.”  I hadn’t seen #7 yet, but I told him I’d see #7 next, and we could discuss it at the break and during lunch.

During the break, Tom — who had interviewed #7 before the break and agreed he was impressive — mentioned that #7’s abstract had caught his attention the day before, and he had done some reading on the subject — visibility graphs and visibility graph analysis, particularly rectangle visibility graphs.  He agreed to describe the subject and the project to us before we left break, and we left late, at 11:10 AM.

I interviewed student #7 first, after the break, and I was immediately overwhelmed.  As expected, I had difficulty with the language of the graphs.  Graph elements that he called  “vertices” and “edges” I might have called nodes and lines (or connections). I later verified that he was using the proper nomenclature for the field.  I had some ongoing confusion about graphs vs. visibility graphs vs. representation graphs, but I got the gist of the underlying mechanisms.  Then he started describing things like n-dimensional hypercube representation graphs and so on, and again, while I was familiar with the words, I kept having to ask him to describe how he was using the words.  One huge portion of his display was a proof of something, and I wasn’t clear what was proved and said that I simply didn’t have time to verify his proof line by line.  I asked, and he assured me that he had shown his proof to his mentor at MIT and that his mentor had confirmed that the proof was valid.  Later, he explained a formula for minimal embedding dimensions for rectangle k-visibility graphs.  Maybe that was the goal of his proof; it was definitely the focus of his project.  (Tom had described k-visibility to us during the break, so I wasn’t completely at sea — Tom’s 10 minute description was invaluable).  The student showed how the formula applied to some sample graphs he had on his display.  Finally, he talked about how Gray Code applied to his visibility graphs.

Tom’s tutorial during the break had been limited — by necessity — to two dimensional examples, but it allowed me to understand the underlying focus of the student #7’s presentation.  What really impressed, though, was that he generalized from 2 dimensional, low-k cases to n-dimensions and any k.  I was in over my head, but assuming he wasn’t blowing smoke, I had to be impressed.

All in all, while I had spent 15+ minutes interviewing each of the other students, I spent about 25 minutes with this one, grappling with what he was telling me.  (In contrast, student #9 did a project on testing whether very, very large numbers are primes, using a probabilistic calculation (rather than a much slower, though more accurate, deterministic calculation).  She was very articulate and enthusiastic, and her presentation was clear and extremely well done.  Her presentation was engaging, just challenging enough to be interesting without being overwhelming and intimidating, as #7 was.  I later told the other judges that, as impressed as I was by the others, she was the only student I actually had fun talking to.  I could have spent another 10-20 minutes with her, beyond my regular time.)

After I dismissed the students at 12:30 PM, the end of interviews, I joined my co-judges for lunch in our assigned meeting room.  It was pretty clear we were giving #7 first place; it wasn’t even debated.  Our second and third place students were #1 (Alzheimers progress prediction using neural networks) and #9 (Fermat vs. Brute force algorithm to determine primality), but we discussed for about 10-15 minutes which would get which.  Both had great strengths, and both had (minor) weaknesses.  In the end, we gave second place to the girl determining primality, on the basis of the strength of her presentation, although the boy who applied NN’s to Alzheimers patient data was somewhat more impressive in his data analysis and might have more real-world impact.  But it was very close.  We also decided not to award 4th place (since we had so few students) or Honorable Mention, but we chose one project for 4th place just in case it was required by the fair.  When I turned in our final results at 1:30 PM, I was told that a 4th place finisher was required, so I wrote in #6, the girl who had demonstrated Pappus’ Theorem with Javascript code.

Before we turned in results, though, we had to decide on which of us would represent our winner for consideration for Project of the Year, Junior Division.  Project of the Year is selected as the best project in the fair (separately between Junior and Senior divisions), selected from the first place finishers in each category.  That meant our Mathematical Sciences winner (#7) would be competing against winners from other categories, like atmospheric science, biological sciences, physics and astronomy, applied mechanics and structures, etc.  There are 23 junior division categories, which meant our one guy would have to compete against 22 other winners.

Not only that, but the student wouldn’t be presenting his project.  Instead, the judging panels from each category would have to send a representative to the Project of the Year meeting to present the winner to the other PoY representative judges.  Then, over the course of a couple of hours, the PoY judges would debate among themselves which was the best of all projects, and votes would be taken until a final winner was selected.

I was the panel chair last year for Applied Mechanics and Structures, and since nobody else was available, I also presented our winner (which I don’t remember) for Project of the Year.  I quite enjoyed doing so, and I really enjoyed hearing about other winning projects from other categories.  Last year, I think we voted the Microbiology (Medical) winner as PoY.

This year, I had cleared my schedule to be PoY representative if nobody else could do it, but I strongly encouraged our other judges to give it a try, given how much I enjoyed it last year.  Anthony had an afternoon meeting to get to.  Tom had an appointment in the afternoon, but he said he postponed it.  Phil was available.

I said that, while I was willing to do it, I didn’t think I’d be able to do him justice and give our winner a proper presentation at the meeting.  Since Tom had given us a tutorial during our mid-morning break, we finally decided that he’d do it.  However, since he hadn’t presented for PoY before, he asked me what he’d need to do.  I told him that they’d have a photo of the project board, projected on the wall, and I told him to expect to take maybe 3-5 minutes to give a summary of the project to the other judges.  He asked if he could draw on a whiteboard, and I said they’d probably have one.  If he could give the same kind of tutorial to the other judges as he gave us, he could really make the case.

Mainly, I told him that I really believed in the project and that I thought it deserved PoY, or at least deserved to be in the running.  I said that if a kid had built a rocket ready to go to Mars, then I’d give PoY to that kid instead, but otherwise, I thought ours was deserving.  I told Tom to emphasize that the project was a pure mathematics research project and that,  although most of the other categories are experimental or applied, I wanted Tom to argue that the purely theoretical focus of our winner should not be held against the student.  I told Tom that, although it’s not my field, I thought the research went beyond undergraduate level and instead seemed like graduate level research.

We said our farewells to Anthony and Phil, and Tom and I walked over to where the PoY Junior Division meeting was going to be held.  I turned in our results in an office nearby (adding in our 4th place finisher), and I left.  I bought some souvenirs from the fair, ran into Phil outside and chatted with him and a friend of his, and then I went to the King Tut exhibit.  I bought some more souvenirs there, too.

That evening, as I sat in W’s piano lesson, I checked on the web and found that our Mathematical Sciences First Place Winner had also been awarded Project of the Year!  I immediately checked my e-mail and found a note from Tom, "Our man Espen Slettnes, #J1507 was awarded the Project of the Year award for the junior division.”  Phil even sent a photo.

I immediately e-mailed Tom and Phil to thank them for the news and photo.

Congratulations to Espen Slettnes, First Place Winner in Mathematical Sciences, Junior Division, of the California Science Fair 2018 and Winner for Project of the Year (Junior Division)!

On April 5, our fourth day of vacation, we checked out of the hotel and got on a Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto, from Shinagawa station.  When we got the tickets, I had an embarrassing moment when the ticket agent said my credit card was over the limit.  I gave him my other credit card.  It wasn’t until a few minutes later, after I turned on the WiFi hotspot, that I found out that my credit card was nowhere near the limit, but rather that Bank of America had suddenly gotten suspicious of my travel charges — despite the fact that I had logged a travel warning with them weeks before.  This ticked me off because The BofA Visa is a special travel Visa that doesn’t charge foreign exchange fees, and the Shinkansen charge was the single largest expense on our trip.  I clicked on my BofA iPhone app to approve the charges, but I was still steamed.

That embarrassment aside, though we got the roundtrip tickets on the Shinkansen, and we also reserved our return seats on Narita Express for Sunday.

The ride, as expected, was fast and incredibly smooth.  We got off at Kyoto Station and then took subways to Sanjo Keihan Station.  The subway system in Kyoto is not nearly as complex as it is in Tokyo, although the disadvantage is it has fewer stations near places we might want to visit.  Still, Sanjo Keihan was only a few blocks away from Gion Shinmonso, the ryokan where we’d be staying.

For Kyoto, I very much wanted the boys to experience staying in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn, where the hospitality is more personal — almost intimate — than at a large modern hotel.  During my only previous visit to Kyoto, with Hsuan when I was a grad student, we stayed in a single story Kyoto ryokan where our room opened out onto a private garden.  I didn’t think we could afford that kind of ryokan this time, but the Gion Shinmonso — a four story ryokan with some modern amenities (like WiFi on all floors) — was well reviewed, located in walking distance not only to the subways but also to Gion, the heart of old Kyoto, and just as important, available during our visit.  In addition to having breakfast every morning, we also booked our room with dinner every evening.  That limited our dining options to not going out for dinner, but the dinners we had at Gion Shinmonso were so excellent that I didn’t regret missing the restaurants.

Our room was a 15 tatami mat room.  We counted 12, but that didn’t include our private bathroom and entryway.  We all had yukatas and slippers provided for us, and only J refrained from wearing them.  There were public baths on the first floor, and again, only J refrained from using them.  I used the men’s bath three times during our stay, before dinners, and twice there was a man and his young son in there, who left around the time I entered.  The other time, nobody was there, so basically, I had naked-time in the bath all to myself.  The baths were not natural hot springs types of baths that you can find in some high-end ryokans; rather, these were indoor spa types of baths.  Still, very relaxing.  (Yes, I washed before entering, using the showers and toiletries provided.  I had researched the rules of public bath etiquette, but the hotel had posted instructions for visitors unfamiliar with the customs.  I washed again upon exiting.)

Our first dinner at the Gion Shinmonso — after arrival and after I visited the bath — was our first kaiseki dinner, served to us in our room.  Kaiseki is a multi-course meal designed to highlight not only multiple ingredients but also multiple methods of preparation.  I won’t bother describing each dish, but they’re all pictured above, for the most part.  It’s haute cuisine, and Kyoto kaiseki is the pinnacle of kaiseki.  We weren’t disappointed in the least — each dish was exquisite in taste and impeccable in presentation.

We were served at the table in our room by a nice, middle-aged lady in a kimono, who was later assisted by a young man dressed in black.  The lady spoke a little English, but the young man spoke much better English and wound up serving as our interpreter for the dinners.

One thing:  They started a bit later than our 7:30 PM dinner time, so they must have been rushing to serve all the rooms on our floor.  The result is that Hsuan and the boys (mostly J) couldn’t finish each course before the next one came.  By the end, J’s tray held a little food from every course.  Hsuan and I felt a little rushed.

After dinner, the lady and the young man cleared out the Japanese furniture and laid out futons and bedding for us for the night.

The next day, April 6 (our fifth day of vacation), we went on our only guided tour of the vacation.  The first stop was Nijo Castle, the castle of the Shoguns, complete with moat and other defensive measures, because Shoguns, unlike Emperors, had to worry about being killed by enemies.

We walked (sans shoes) on the nightingale floor that went throughout the castle buildings.  The floor was made of wood that squeaked like the sound of many nightingales chirping — a sound intended to alert people in the rooms that someone was walking outside — visitors, or assassins.

We visited various rooms where our tour guide (Yuki) said that the Shogun received various visitors, from outer daimyo (those whom he had defeated in battle and who surrendered), to inner daimyo (those who fought for him), to family and others.  For the most part, the Shogun sat on a platform elevated slightly above those that others sat on — except the Emperor’s messenger, who when visiting sat on the higher platform.

In some rooms, where the Shogun had to demonstrate his superior authority and military might, images on the walls included things like tigers, but in more intimate or private rooms, the walls were either blank or at least less intimidating.

There was a room where the last Shogun decided to give up his power (for the Meiji Restoration), and another room where he formally announced he was giving power back to the Emperor.

Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take photos indoors.

Our next stop was to visit the Golden Pavilion at Kinkaku-ji. What more can I say about a building covered in gold?  That’s a lot of gold.  The building was originally bought by Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu from the family of a statesman, and later it was converted to a Zen temple by the Shogun’s son.

Visitors aren’t allowed in the temple, for fear of the delicacy of the building and the fact that it has burned down in the past.

Our next stop — and the start of rain — was the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.  Or former Imperial Palace, as the current Emperor lives in Tokyo.  As before, visitors weren’t allowed in the bulding, so we mainly walked the grounds.  This is the palace where Emperor Meiji took power during the Meiji Restoration, before moving the capital (i.e. his residence) to Tokyo.

From about 12:30 PM to about 2 PM, we had lunch and shopped at the Kyoto Handicraft Center, where Hsuan bought a bunch of candies for gifts to friends back home, and W and I got yukata for ourselves.  J posed in front of this cool set of armor (replica), which was offered at some enormous price.

Lunch was made for Western tourists — chicken nuggets, spaghetti, fries, etc.

After lunch, we got a new tour guide — KC, or Casey — who affected a very effeminate, gay persona that I wasn’t 100% certain was real.  Maybe 80%.

Our first stop after lunch was the Heian Shrine.  The area is huge, and it includes a large Japanese Garden that, unfortunately, we missed as we visited the main shrine interior.  No photos allowed inside, and there was a police-like official there to enforce the rule.  People were tossing coins into the offering box and clapping their hands and bowing to the shrine god.

Although the shrine was dedicated to a couple of modern emperors, it seems mainly motivated by civic pride and and civic revival, after the transfer of the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo and after WWII.

The next tour stop, for which I have no photos, was the Sanjusangen-do, or Temple of 1000 Buddhas.  By the time we got there, the rain was pouring, and we had only one umbrella between the four of us.  I didn’t feel like taking photos outdoors, and photos indoors were strictly forbidden.  We walked past the thousand buddha statues, and that number seemed roughly correct, or maybe even a little low if bodhisattva statues are included.  I guess each statue is supposed to be different, but I didn’t look closely enough to notice.  I did notice that they all needed a lot of dusting.

Our final tour stop for the day was the Kiyomizu temple.  I recall visiting this on my prior trip.  The main attraction for tourists seems to be the Otowa waterfall with three channels from which visitors can drink.  There’s a cool ultraviolet sterilizing station nearby where the cups-on-sticks are sterilized.  Each of the three water channels is supposed to grant a wish — love, wealth, whatever — but you’re not supposed to drink from all three, which is greedy and may result in a curse instead of a blessing.

There were other shrines in the area which we didn’t visit, and W and J wanted to take a scenic path up into the hills.  However, after walking a bit, Hsuan and I got concerned about returning to our bus on time, so we turned around.

The walk to and from the temple was lined with shops selling souvenirs and food.  With all the rain, I would have liked to have stopped off for a hot snack, but I was worried about getting to our bus on time.  Hsuan and the boys dropped behind, as we walked through the crowds with their umbrellas, and somehow she and the boys decided to stop for ice cream (despite the rain and the cold air).

While walking, I noticed a high density of women in kimonos.  We were told by our tour guides that the vast majority of people — women — wearing kimonos in Kyoto are tourists, some from elsewhere in Japan but many, perhaps most, from outside of Japan. Tourists get a kick out of wearing kimonos for a day, playing dress-up and trying to look like traditional, elegant Japanese ladies. Kimono rentals are a popular business.

The non-Japanese kimono-wearers often give not-so-subtle cues that they're not Japanese, e.g. the most obvious clue being that of speaking (loudly) in Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese.

Of course, there are also actual Japanese people who wear kimonos at work, like the ladies staffing ryokans like Gion Shinmonso, or at certain restaurants (e.g. the Asakusa Imahan in Tokyo).  And sometimes one can see maiko or geiko wearing kimonos in Kyoto.

After the tour, we were dropped off at Kyoto Station and again took the subway back to our neighborhood, and then we walked back to Gion Shinmonso.  We were thoroughly soaked from the rain, and after hanging up my outerwear to dry (and take out our passports also to dry), I visited the public bath to refresh and rejuvenate.

Our dinner was again kaiseki, served in our room.  This time, I should note a highlight, for me, was beef cooked on a hot stone.  Another highlight was the mango custard for dessert, and I also had a bottle of junmai sake.

Dinner started at 7:30 PM sharp, and J was able to keep up, though he didn’t eat everything.

In addition to the middle-aged lady and the young man serving us, we were also served by an elderly lady.  After dinner, the young man and the elderly lady came by our room to lay out the futons and bedding.