Every summer, the Simons Laufer Mathematics Insitute (SLMath, formerly known as MSRI) hosts a wide array of summer schools for graduate students. In Summer 2026, two UH PhD students attended these summer schools: Janani Lakshmanan attended the “Principled Scientific Discovery with Formal Methods” school at the IBM Research Campus in Yorktown Heights, New York. And Kawika O’Connor who attended the “Topological and Geometric Structures in Low Dimensions” school in Berkeley, CA.
“The summer school brought together graduate students from all over the country at very different stages of their careers and gave us a crash course in the current frontiers of machine learning. We did a lot of hands-on learning, and it really gave me a lot more confidence in writing code. We also were invited to present our own work and make connections with researchers at IBM. “ -Janani Lakshmanan.
“It was a lot of fun meeting other graduate students at around the same point in their careers. I will admit to having quite a bit of imposter syndrome going into the summer school, but that — thankfully — dried up pretty quickly. It was very hands on, very geometric, and just an all around blast. ” – Kawika O’Connor.
We include a couple of photos below:
UH Math PhD student Janani Lakshmanan in front of Quantum System II, the most advanced quantum computer in the world right now.
Students gathering data on pendulum frequencies to feed into an AIHilbert program, a brand new machine-learning powered polynomial regression model introduced by researchers at Samsung and IBM.