AAASE Summit
Joy Xie, [DATE]
[Summary]

November 15th - 17th 2024, our parent organization AAASE held their inaugural National Summit at UC Irvine’s Beckman Center.
It consisted of a series of keynote lectures from very accomplished Asian American industry leaders (including a Nobel Laureate!), the high school competition (which I’ll talk more about soon), and many social/networking opportunities.
Friday:
My family and I drove down to UC Irvine from our town of Santa Barbara, making a few pit stops along the way to eat lunch and tour UCLA. The drive, not counting the stops, took around 3ish hours, and we arrived in Irvine in the early evening. The first thing I noticed about Irvine was the sheer amount of food places—boba, hot pot, dozens of Asian cuisine places…after taking a detour to get Meet Fresh, we finally arrived at our hotel.
AAASE had specifically made arrangements with the hotel, so most (if not all) of the other attendees, Junior Board members, and high school competition teams were staying there, too. Since I’m part of one of the high school teams that qualified for the national competition, I met up with my team and we ran through our presentation a couple times and made some last-minute changes. But before I talk about that, I should go over what the high school competition is:
The High School Competition:
The AAASE Summer Program (where I met all the other JB members and how I got introduced to AAASE) this past August was basically one big competition. Teams competed to create a product/company concept in a week and pitch/demo it in front of a bunch of highly qualified judges.
We were given a week before the program officially started to scout each other out on Discord and form teams of five. The team selection process was, for the most part, up to us. Some people already had semi-developed project ideas and were able to recruit others with specific specialties in mind.
My team, on the other hand, started out with no idea whatsoever. (We did consider pitching a hangover cure initially, but decided against it—hangover cures aren’t exactly the sort of thing that look good coming from a group of high schoolers). But after an entire day dedicated to brainstorming—including walking laps around our dorms, discussions with our Innovation TA (a college student assigned to each team to mentor us) in the dorm lounge—we finally decided on our final idea: CareCrow, a neural-network powered service that would use satellite imagery to help farmers detect plant diseases.
After developing our idea for four more days (researching satellite technology that could capture crop data, coding up a neural network, developing a business plan, and creating a dramatic video introducing our product), we pitched our idea and snagged second place. That qualified us for the National Competition that weekend in Irvine, where we’d compete again with the first place Stanford team and the first and second place Princeton Teams (AAASE also hosted another summer program in Princeton, where teams similarly competed).
After the Stanford competition was over and we knew we’d be competing again, our team spent another few months developing our product, adding a few more features and building a mock website.
Saturday:
7:30 am:
We (well, I; other people probably woke up earlier) woke up, took the prearranged bus to Beckman center, and ate a complimentary continental breakfast. We also got a nice goodie bag with the AAASE logo on it and a fancy program book detailing the schedule and backgrounds of the speakers.
8:00 am:
The day officially started and we were welcomed by the founding members of AAASE, including the AAASE president Dr. Ed Guo. After a short welcome speech, Nobel Laureate/Former Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu talked about the history of Asian American contributions in science and technology in the United States. I hadn’t known very much about what Asian Americans went through and accomplished before the 2000s, so it was a very interesting talk (did you know that thousands of Chinese immigrants built a section of the transcontinental railroad?).
9:20 am:
Now, we started getting into the scientific keynotes. Dr. Zhenan Bao of Stanford University gave us an overview of her research into Skin-Inspired Electronics (from what I gleaned from the talk, these are bendable, electricity-conducting devices that can be worn on the body to collect information—like dopamine levels—from the wearer). It was very interesting, but unfortunately my chemistry knowledge was not very deep and I only understood parts of it.
10:00 am:
The next event was allegedly a Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology Panel. I say allegedly because my group missed this event—we went outside to practice our presentation for the high school competition. We came back an hour later, catching the last keynote before lunch (which was also my favorite keynote!). The speaker was Dr. Andrea Liu from the University of Pennsylvania, and she gave a talk titled Machine Learning without a Processor. She talked about just that—machine learning without a processor. In other words, instead of using CPU and GPU to train a model, her research team used electronic components. In this way, according to Dr. Liu, they were able to achieve a fast, low-power, and robust (i.e. it could still perform well even after a large fraction of neurons were damaged) model, similar to the human brain.
11:30 am:
On the program, it was supposed to be Lunch by then. However, because some of the talks went overtime and Congresswoman Judy Chu (whose talk was originally scheduled after lunch) arrived early, the schedule was altered a bit. Congresswoman Chu—who is also the first Chinese-American woman to be elected to congress—talked about some of the politics in science that related to Asian Americans. Namely, the China Initiative, a government program that prosecuted many leading Chinese American scientists on the (in most cases, false) basis that they were potential Chinese spies. One of the professors who was honored at the AAASE Award Ceremony, Gang Chen, was falsely prosecuted because of the China Initiative and hearing his account was very heartbreaking.
12:30 pm
Unfortunately, I missed lunch and the events following lunch. The Harker Physics Invitational—-a student-run physics competition created by students of the Harker School—was scheduled for that day, so I hurried back to the hotel to take it before coming back in time for the High School Competition.
4:30 pm
As we settled into our seats in the Beckman Center to watch the first team present, I was a bit nervous. The auditorium was packed with very smart and important people: professors, entrepreneurs, and a Nobel laureate. We were the last team to go, so we were able to watch the other high school presentations.
Princeton Team 1: VoltX (aka Drones) - their project was an improvement on drones using AI and wireless charging. They presented their calculations on how their modified drone could wirelessly charge on the electrical wires outside—removing the need to dock at a charging station every thirty minutes or so—and pathfind with the help of AI. In the middle of their presentation, they unveiled a demo drone and flew it around the room, which was very cool.
Princeton Team 2: Solar 2 All - Their presentation had to do with a new way of making solar cells. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the technical specifics of their project that much, but I do remember them going into policy and the business side of things.
Stanford Team 1: Wheelie (aka Rover) - this was the other team present at the Stanford team, and one of the more impressive teams. At the Stanford Summer Camp, they built a whole prototype of their concept—a legged wheelchair—in just a week. Their idea was that a legged wheelchair (think of the Boston Dynamics dog, but with wheels on its feet and big enough for a person to sit on: that was what their prototype looked like) would be safer and allow for better mobility over stairs and other obstacles than the conventional wheelchair. In the time between this summer and the summit, they had created another prototype, one that could function outside on rough terrain.
Stanford Team 2: CareCrow - this was us! We went over our concept (a service that could take multispectral pictures of fields using satellites, then use AI to analyze the data and detect spots where there was potential disease and pest), our business plans, and our mock website, then took some questions. Overall, it went off without a hitch—except the laptop we were using didn’t screenshare onto the projector properly, so we had to borrow another team’s at the last minute.
6:00 pm
After all the teams presented, there was a reception (I actually didn’t know what a “reception” was before this—it’s basically social time with some light snacks), where we got to interact with the professors and other attendees of the summit. During the reception, an assistant professor at UC Irvine approached our team and chatted with us about her field of study, materials engineering, and how it related to the computer vision tools that we talked about in our presentation. It was a very cool experience seeing that our project had relations to research projects that are actually being worked on in the real world.
Oh, and our team also got a picture with Steven Chu!
7:00 pm
We were ushered back into the main lobby of the Beckman Center, where we found fancy tables set up for us for the Gala Dinner. The dinner was a fancily-named but mediocrely-tasting chicken. In the middle of the dinner, the winners were announced…
Second place was given to VoltX and Wheelie got first!
By then, it was around 9 pm and I was kind of exhausted after all those keynotes and presentations, so I went back to the hotel with my family.
Sunday:
There were more keynotes:
Lessons from an Asian Scientist After 75 Years in the US by Dr. Alice Huang (former president of the AAAS)
Understanding the Noncoding Genome by Dr. Sankar Ghosh of Columbia
Climate Change and Sustainability: Creating a circular carbon economy by Dr. Alissa Park of UCLA
Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship by Hansong Zhang
And finally, closing remarks from Dr. Guo, which concluded the summit!
Overall, the summit was a great experience—I got reunite with my team, listen to interesting research keynotes, and get a picture with Steven Chu :0