Advanced Math/Science Research (AMSR) is a year long course that offers students an authentic independent laboratory experience. Most students join after their sophomore year for a two-year experience. Students design and execute an original research project in the natural sciences with the guidance of professional scientists. The course typically culminates with a research paper, presentation of their work in a public poster session and submission of that work to a national science competition. Berkshire's world-class facility is like no other high school laboratory and it gets better every year!
Congratulations to our two Top Scholars!
Over the past Ten years, Eleven Advanced Math/Science Research students have been named Science Talent Search (STS) semifinalists, a distinction earned by only 300 students in the country each year.
RENAMED THE REGENERON STS (FORMERLY INTEL) IN 2017, IT IS THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS SCIENCE COMPETITION FOR PRE-COLLEGE STUDENTS IN THE NATION. THE STS has been CALLED THE "JUNIOR NOBEL"
Propionibacterium acnes biofilm: The Effect of Peptide 1018 on Bacterial Production
Avalon Z. M. Lebenthal
Abstract: Propionibacterium acnes is a major component of the human skin microbiome and plays an important role in the etiology of acne. P. acnes produces a biofilm, aiding in its growth and protection. Researchers studying the destruction and growth of biofilm have recently linked peptide 1018 to the breakdown of many different bacterial biofilms (and its prevention of reformation of films in these colonies). This peptide works to disrupt biofilm growth by blocking the cellular production of (p)ppGpp in the organisms. In this study, the presence of biofilm was investigated in various amounts of peptide 1018; studied through digital pixelation density recordings of stained microtiter plates and electron microscopy. Peptide 1018 was effective in preventing P. acne biofilm. After peptide exposure, the P. acnes may have increased sensitivity to various anti-microbial products, including silver, copper, sulfur, blue light phototherapy, and manuka honey. The results from the peptide effectiveness tests could later be used with these substances for the development of a combination therapy that will kill off the bacteria, without harming human tissue.
Robust Adversarial Perturbation in Deep Proposal-based Models
Making driverless cars even safer....
Daniel Tian
Abstract: Adversarial noises are useful tools to probe the weakness of deep learning-based computer vision algorithms. This research describes a robust adversarial perturbation (R-AP) to attack deep proposal-based object detectors and instance segmentation algorithms. The proposed method focuses on attacking the common component in these algorithms, namely Region Proposal Network (RPN), to universally degrade their performances in a black-box fashion. To do so, a loss function, which combines a label loss and a novel shape loss, was optimized with respect to an image using a gradient based iterative algorithm. Evaluations are performed on the MS COCO 2014 dataset for the adversarial attacking of 6 state-of-the-art object detectors and 2 instance segmentation algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.
Solving real-world problems
Daniel worked with researchers at SUNY-Albany to develop and test an algorithm to examine the limitations of image recognition. This technology could improve software used in driver-less cars and other image detection technologies.
AMSR ECONOMICS STUDENTS study bitcoin VOLATILITY and Initial coin OFFERINGS.
preparing the samples from VARROA MITES FOUND IN BEEHIVES IN NEW ENGLAND.
THE HEALTH OF AN APIARY CAN BE ASSESSED by the microbes that are found within the mites
THE BACTERIA COLLECTED FROM THE MITES WAS SCREENED FOR ACTIVITY OF SEVERAL DIFFERENTIAL MEDIA