Senior math main Janabel Xia is a research of an individual in fixed movement.
When she isn’t sorting algorithms and bettering site visitors management programs for driverless automobiles, she’s dancing as a member of at the least 4 dance golf equipment. She’s joined a number of social justice organizations, labored on cryptography and internet authentication know-how, and created a polling app that permits customers to vote anonymously.
In her closing semester, she’s placing the pedal to the steel, with a inexperienced gentle to minimize the carbon footprint of city transportation through the use of sensors at site visitors gentle intersections.
First steps
Rising up in Lexington, Massachusetts, Janabel has been competing on math groups since elementary college. On her math crew, which met early mornings earlier than the beginning of faculty, she found a love of problem-solving that challenged her greater than her classroom “plug-and-chug workout routines.”
At Lexington Excessive College, she was math crew captain, a two-time Math Olympiad attendee, and a silver medalist for Workforce USA on the European Women’ Mathematical Olympiad.
As a math main, she research combinatorics and theoretical pc science, together with theoretical and utilized cryptography. In her sophomore yr, she was a researcher within the Cryptography and Data Safety Group on the MIT Pc Science and Synthetic Intelligence Laboratory, the place she performed cryptanalysis analysis below Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan.
A part of her pursuits in cryptography stem from the great thing about the underlying arithmetic itself — the sphere appears like intelligent engineering with mathematical instruments. However one other a part of her curiosity in cryptography stems from its political dimensions, together with its potential to essentially change current energy buildings and governance. Xia and college students on the College of California at Berkeley and Stanford College created zkPoll, a personal polling app written with the Circom programming language, that permits customers to create polls for particular units of individuals, whereas producing a zero-knowledge proof that retains private info hidden to lower unfavourable voting influences from public notion.
Her participation within the PKG Middle’s Lively Group Engagement Freshman Pre-Orientation Program launched her to area people organizations specializing in meals safety, housing for previously incarcerated people, and entry to well being care. She can also be a part of Studying for Revolution, a scholar guide membership that discusses race, class, and working-class actions inside MIT and the Larger Boston space.
Xia’s academic journey led to her ongoing pursuit of mixing mathematical and computational strategies in areas adjoining to city planning. “After I realized how a lot planning was involved with social justice because it was involved with design, I grew to become extra interested in the sphere.”
Occurring autopilot
She took lessons with the Division of City Research and Planning and is presently engaged on an Undergraduate Analysis Alternatives Program (UROP) undertaking with Professor Cathy Wu within the Institute for Information, Programs, and Society.
Latest work on eco-driving by Wu and doctoral scholar Vindula Jayawardana investigated semi-autonomous automobiles that talk with sensors localized at site visitors intersections, which in idea might scale back carbon emissions by as much as 21 %.
Xia goals to optimize the implementation scheme for these sensors at site visitors intersections, contemplating a graded scheme the place maybe solely 20 % of all sensors are initially put in, and extra sensors get added in waves. She desires to maximise the emission discount charges at every step of the method, in addition to guarantee there isn’t any pointless set up and de-installation of such sensors.
Dance numbers
In the meantime, Xia has been a member of MIT’s Fixation, Ridonkulous, and MissBehavior teams, and as a conventional Chinese language dance choreographer for the MIT Asian Dance Workforce.
A dancer since she was 3, Xia began with Chinese language conventional dance, and later added ballet and jazz. As a result of she is as a lot of a dancer as a researcher, she has found out how one can make her schedule work.
“Manufacturing weeks are all the time insanity, with dancers working straight from class to decorate rehearsals and exhibits all night and coming again early subsequent morning to take down lights and roll up marley [material that covers the stage floor],” she says. “As busy because it retains me, I couldn’t have survived MIT with out dance. I like the self-discipline, creativity, and most significantly the teamwork that dance calls for of us. I actually love the dance group right here with my complete coronary heart. These buddies have impressed me and given me the like to energy me by way of MIT.”
Xia lives along with her fellow Dance Workforce members on the off-campus Ladies’s Unbiased Dwelling Group (WILG). “I actually worth WILG’s tradition of independence, each in life-style — cooking, cleansing up after your self, managing home services, and so on. — and thought — questioning norms, staying away from standing video games, discovering new passions.”
Along with her UROP, she’s wrapping up some commencement necessities, ending up a analysis paper on sorting algorithms from her summer season on the College of Minnesota Duluth Analysis Expertise for Undergraduates in combinatorics, and deciding between PhD packages in math and pc science.
“My greatest aim proper now’s to determine how one can mix my pursuits in arithmetic and concrete research, and extra broadly join technical views with human-centered work in a approach that feels proper to me,” she says.
“Total, MIT has given me so many avenues to discover that I might have by no means considered earlier than coming right here, for which I’m infinitely grateful. Each time I discover one thing new, it’s onerous for me to not discover it cool. There’s simply a lot on the market to study. Whereas it may well really feel overwhelming at instances, I hope to proceed that studying and exploration for the remainder of my life.”
