Data Science Research Camp
Prerequisites
To enroll, students must meet one of the following criteria:
Additionally, all students will undergo an interview (March 15 to April 6, 2025) conducted by Dr. Lu as part of the selection process. Only 9–12 students will be selected for the program. If fewer than 9 students meet Dr. Lu’s standards by April 6, 2025, the program will not be offered and students will be fully refunded. Note: This program is open exclusively to high school students.
Having an active Colab Pro account is absolutely required for this research camp. This subscription costs $10/month and can be canceled after the camp and 4 online classes if desired. A Colab Pro account is mandatory. Students without a Colab Pro subscription will not be able to do research. To avoid delays or disruptions, please ensure your Colab Pro account is set up before the camp begins. For more information or to create a Colab Pro account, visit: https://colab.research.google.com/signup.
To enroll, students must meet one of the following criteria:
- Completion of Dr. Lu’s "Introduction to Data Science Using Machine Learning Models" (Summer 2024 online).
- Completion of Daniel’s "Introductory Machine Learning and AI" (offered in Summer 2023 or 2024 camps).
Additionally, all students will undergo an interview (March 15 to April 6, 2025) conducted by Dr. Lu as part of the selection process. Only 9–12 students will be selected for the program. If fewer than 9 students meet Dr. Lu’s standards by April 6, 2025, the program will not be offered and students will be fully refunded. Note: This program is open exclusively to high school students.
Having an active Colab Pro account is absolutely required for this research camp. This subscription costs $10/month and can be canceled after the camp and 4 online classes if desired. A Colab Pro account is mandatory. Students without a Colab Pro subscription will not be able to do research. To avoid delays or disruptions, please ensure your Colab Pro account is set up before the camp begins. For more information or to create a Colab Pro account, visit: https://colab.research.google.com/signup.
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Dr. Lu has extensive experience guiding undergraduate students in research and publishing academic papers. However, as this is her first time working with high school students, she cannot guarantee that the research will result in publication. The primary goal of this program is to provide students with hands-on research experience. Since the project is a team-based effort, it may not align with the criteria for national competitions. Dr. Lu’s emphasis is on inspiring students to engage in research, rather than enhancing their college applications.
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Class Structure
Research Project Overview This project centers on the VIX (Volatility Index), which measures the expected risk-neutral volatility of S&P 500 index returns, as calculated by the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Using VIX term structure data derived from Dr. Lu’s 2024 REU project, students will investigate various machine learning models and apply them to this financial data. The ultimate goal is to leverage the VIX term structure to predict the returns of volatility derivative products. |
Mathematics (Senior & Junior)
General Information:
Students will take an assessment test prior to the camp and will be grouped into 2 groups: the math junior group and the math senior group. The math junior group will cover teaching material similar to that of the Mathcounts and AMC 8 level. The math senior group will cover teaching material similar to that of the AMC 10/12 level. Both groups will take full day math classes in week 1.
Students will take an assessment test prior to the camp and will be grouped into 2 groups: the math junior group and the math senior group. The math junior group will cover teaching material similar to that of the Mathcounts and AMC 8 level. The math senior group will cover teaching material similar to that of the AMC 10/12 level. Both groups will take full day math classes in week 1.
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Math Senior
Dr. Pavlo Pylyavskyy and Dr. Xiang Tang will lead the Math Senior group. The morning classes will be an introduction to the rigorous techniques in mathematics, led by Dr. Tang. Students will be taught the methods of proof by contradiction and proof by mathematical induction together with combinatorial arguments and elementary analysis. Instead of computation, the discussion will emphasize analytic reasoning. Students will have daily exercises on writing proofs. The classes do not assume students to have experience in math competitions. Everyone interested in learning exciting mathematics and willing to work hard are welcome. The afternoon class will concentrate on practicing math olympiad level questions in a game/team competition form, led by Dr. Pylyavskyy. Students will solve problems and then compete with opposing teams by presenting solutions and judging each other’s presentations, as traditional in Math Battle format. Other formats may be tried as well. This playful format helps students develop serious skills in solving math olympiad questions and learning to present them in rigorous proof-based manner. |
Math Junior
Dr. Jiangang Yao will lead the Math Junior group. Each morning and each afternoon, the first two hours will consist of topic-focused lectures. In each lecture, Dr. Yao will explain the problem-solving strategies and techniques for a specific type of problem through detailed analysis of typical problems. Each morning, there will also be a one-hour individual test, and in the afternoon, there will be a one-hour team competition, with each team consisting of four members. The format will be similar to the team competition in Mathcounts. The final hour of the afternoon will be a buzzer contest. Every day, we will rank the top 10 participants in the class based on their overall performance in the "individual test + team competition + buzzer contest" and present certificates and chocolates to the winners in the evening. The total number of problems practiced everyday will be around 100. For students who wish to practice more in the evening, we will also provide additional resources. Overall, we aim to create an immersive math training experience that is both highly competitive and enjoyable. Hopefully in 2026, we could see camper’s names appear in the AMC8 HRD list or Mathcounts National Winners list. |
Business for Youth
General Information:
The complete M4Y program is designed especially for students from Grade 7 to 12, which aims to help students systematically build fundamentals of business operations and applications, promote collaboration with other team members, improve negotiation skills, understand advertising and marketing in a consumer-driven market, analyze business operations, design business strategy, and master their business tools and skill sets.
The complete M4Y program is designed especially for students from Grade 7 to 12, which aims to help students systematically build fundamentals of business operations and applications, promote collaboration with other team members, improve negotiation skills, understand advertising and marketing in a consumer-driven market, analyze business operations, design business strategy, and master their business tools and skill sets.
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Dr. Jingwei Meng will lead this class. E001 has 6 sessions (4 hours each) in week 2 afternoons. Explore your detective side!
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"You slowly regain consciousness. Looking around, you find yourself in a large room with a group of people. You don't remember who you are or why you are here. What catches your attention the most is a dead body lying in the middle of the room..."
This summer session of “MBA for Youth” Program (M4Y) will be a special class, E001. As an experiential class, E001 will be a “Murder Mystery” game. All participants will be locked in an isolated place and plan to “Escape Room”. You will need to act and perform accordingly based on pre-designed scripts. The complete game is divided into 4 stages and you can only move to the next stage until the participants discover enough clues. You will need to get familiar with your environment, talk with other people, find clues, and, eventually, catch the murderer. Throughout this process, you will learn related business knowledge in marketing, accounting basics, financial regulations, public speaking, group discussion, and show your talents in various roles. |
History
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Ms. MO Dudley will lead the history course. This class will prepare students for AP history courses, teaching students the fundamental elements of historical analysis and the basics of research. Students will be able to understand, analyze, and discuss themes and concepts within historical narratives. They will also learn about different types of sources, examine the process of history research, and have the opportunity to conduct their own research on history topics of their choosing. The class includes 6 lectures (3 hours each) in week 2 mornings.
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The class will involve lectures, hands-on activities done individually and in groups, games, and individual research. It is designed for students with any amount of experience in history who are looking to prepare for AP history classes, develop their research abilities, and improve their critical thinking.
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Robotics
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Mr. Aiden Kronebusch will lead the Robotics class. Based on FIRST Robotics Competition's team structure and games, this class will teach fundamental concepts of engineering, team coordination, and a variety of technical skills to help students build and polish their own mini-robots. Students will be split into a number of teams, and at the end of the week each team will face off in a bracket-based competition using the robots they built.
This class has no prerequisites. Knowledge of mathematics, basic physics, and programming is helpful, but by no means required. All information related to using the robot kits will be taught throughout the course. TA’s will be present for any questions you may have. While this class is intended for high-school students around 9th-12th grade, there is nothing stopping those in lower grade levels from attending. This class will be limited to 18 students and has 5 lectures (4 hours each) in the afternoons of week 1. |
Key Teaching Points:
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Introductory Machine Learning and AI
Prerequisites: Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry. Basics of Python or Java (variables, if/else, loops, functions) is a MUST. Students may choose to take Introduction to Python in week 1 of the AoS summer camp to get familiar with basic programming.
Are you eager to gain hands-on experience with the world’s top AI tools? Do you want to learn to construct your own machine learning models, including the recognition of images? Join us this summer at AoS.
Having an active Colab Pro account is absolutely required for this course. This subscription costs $10/month and can be canceled after the camp if desired. A Colab Pro account is mandatory for participating in hands-on exercises. Students without a Colab Pro subscription will not be able to complete the exercises, which are critical for learning and mastering the course material.
To avoid delays or disruptions, please ensure your Colab Pro account is set up before the camp begins. For more information or to create a Colab Pro account, visit: https://colab.research.google.com/signup.
Throughout the course, students will grasp the fundamentals of constructing various neural networks and training them with data. Practical experience awaits as they train their own machine learning models using PyTorch. Additionally, students will have the unique opportunity to interact directly with some of the world's best machine learning models. This includes engaging in conversations with cutting-edge language models and generating images using state-of-the-art text-to-image models.
In the final two days, students will collaborate on a project. The task involves designing, implementing, and training a machine learning model for a specific purpose, including vision recognition and classification. Awards will be given to the team that develops the most outstanding model. This promises to be both an enjoyable and rewarding experience. This class is full of both fun and learning.
Are you eager to gain hands-on experience with the world’s top AI tools? Do you want to learn to construct your own machine learning models, including the recognition of images? Join us this summer at AoS.
Having an active Colab Pro account is absolutely required for this course. This subscription costs $10/month and can be canceled after the camp if desired. A Colab Pro account is mandatory for participating in hands-on exercises. Students without a Colab Pro subscription will not be able to complete the exercises, which are critical for learning and mastering the course material.
To avoid delays or disruptions, please ensure your Colab Pro account is set up before the camp begins. For more information or to create a Colab Pro account, visit: https://colab.research.google.com/signup.
Throughout the course, students will grasp the fundamentals of constructing various neural networks and training them with data. Practical experience awaits as they train their own machine learning models using PyTorch. Additionally, students will have the unique opportunity to interact directly with some of the world's best machine learning models. This includes engaging in conversations with cutting-edge language models and generating images using state-of-the-art text-to-image models.
In the final two days, students will collaborate on a project. The task involves designing, implementing, and training a machine learning model for a specific purpose, including vision recognition and classification. Awards will be given to the team that develops the most outstanding model. This promises to be both an enjoyable and rewarding experience. This class is full of both fun and learning.
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Mr. Daniel Li will be leading a 6-day class focused on Introductory Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. This class has 6 lectures (3 hours each) in week 2 mornings, and 6 computer labs (4 hours each) in week 2 afternoons.
Are you eager to gain hands-on experience with the world’s top AI tools? Do you want to learn to construct your own machine learning models, including the recognition of images? Join us this summer at AoS. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are rapidly advancing fields with applications in various domains. Language models in machine learning can generate coherent text, develop computer programs, and create prediction models. These models are widely used for recognition, detection tasks, and generative tasks like crafting high-quality images from text descriptions. This course is designed for high school students or middle school students with strong math backgrounds. It does not require college-level math or computer science knowledge. However, a solid understanding of Python is essential, including familiarity with Python statements (if, for, while), Python objects, functions, classes, types, and basic arithmetic operations. An online entrance exam lasting 30 minutes, consisting of three problems (covering ifs, loops, functions, and creating very simple classes), will be administered with several time choices specified by the instructor to assess Python proficiency (students may pick their preferred 30 minute time period). A Python course (such as the AoS Python course), should provide sufficient preparation A brief introduction to NumPy arrays/vectors and their operations will be provided during the class. While Python basics will be reviewed briefly, students are expected to already have a foundational understanding. |
Topics Include:
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Introduction to Game Theory
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Mr. Timothy Alexander will lead the game theory class. From our daily encounters with our friends, to the geopolitical relationships between countries, game theory provides a lens to understand the interactions around us. This class will be a fun introduction to the field of game theory and its major dilemmas and principles. It will be centered around interactive learning and having the students play these various economic games and discussing together the various factors involved.
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In a blend of mathematics, economics, and psychology, game theory gives us tools to recognize key patterns in interactions and analyze them in the context of simple fun games. We can then notice and identify these patterns in real world situations and use these game theory tools to better understand these situations and make predictions about them. This class has 5 lectures (3 hours each) in week 1 mornings.
Students will gain an introduction to topics such as:
The topics explored provide a basis for understanding systems and how individuals make decisions within them. It will be taught in an interactive engaging way that increases enjoyment of the subject as well as retention of the concepts by letting the students play through different strategic interactions and games first hand and discussing how these experiences tie to broader theories. |
Creative Sound Design
Required Equipment:
- Laptop with 16GB RAM GPU or Desktop with 8GB RAM GPU or M1 Mac with 8GB Memory GPU.
- Professional monitor / headphones can be borrowed for an extra charge of $75 per pair.
- 14 days free trials of Pro Tools.
- A Cell Phone that can record sound.
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Mrs. Tara Gaoyang will teach the Creative Sound Design Course. This course is designed to introduce the fundamental concept of the art of sound as well as a sound designers’ perspective to the film industry. The course will briefly introduce the workflow of the film production and the key elements of the sound design art. This class has 5 lectures (4 hours each) in week 1 afternoon.
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Course Concepts:
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Honors Biology
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Ms. Zhishan Wang will lead the Biology course. This course is designed to introduce high school-level biology to students with little to no background in the subject. Students will learn the fundamentals of biology and gain an understanding of how biology shapes the world around us. Through lectures and simple in-class experiments, this course will help students prepare for advanced biology classes/competitions, such as AP/IB Biology, and hopefully spark an interest in biology that continues beyond the class. This class has 6 lectures (3 hours each) in week 2 mornings.
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Topics covered:
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Introduction to Python
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Mr. Michael Huang will lead the Introduction to Python course. Programming is an immensely powerful tool that is useful in nearly every area of education and life, and especially STEM areas. The goal of this course is to introduce the foundations of programming and to provide students with the basic skill set to use programming to solve problems. It is designed for students with little to no prior coding experience to build a foundation for them and get them excited about the possibilities this skill enables. The goal is to teach not only the technical details of coding, but also the overarching thought processes. We will intersperse lectures, active learning, and workshop components where students get practice applying what they learned. This class has 5 lectures (4 hours each) in the afternoons of week 1.
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Topics Covered:
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Baking
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Mrs. Misha will lead a course on baking. This course is designed to introduce the fundamental concepts and practice of baking, including how to apply different types of flours, how to master the use of an oven, how to appreciate desserts, and how to bake a variety of after dinner treats. Students will learn proper planning and preparation skills to see a task through while contributing in a positive way throughout the course. The goal of this course is not only to have students acquire some basic baking skills which they can apply in their daily life, but also to practice and enhance kids’ motor functions, control, and strength. Additionally, students will be able to learn how to express their artistic skills. This class has 6 lectures (4 hours each) in week 2 afternoon. Classes limited to 20 students.
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Course content:
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Speech
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Mr. Timothy Alexander will teach students the fundamentals of speech and how to communicate your ideas in a powerful effective way. So many students have knowledge and ideas but may lack the ability to effectively communicate it. This class will be centered on empowering students to find their voice and gain confidence in their ability to share their ideas with others. The class includes 6 lectures (4 hours each) in week 2 afternoons.
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In this class, we will focus primarily on delivery and how to use the full range of your speaking, playing with things such as volume, tone, expression, and body language. This class is designed for people of all ages and levels! Public speaking anxiety is one of the most common fears out there so the class will aim to be a gentle safe space to practice and get more comfortable. That said, you should expect there to be frequent speaking in both small groups and in front of the class. Please reach out to me ahead of time if you have any questions about this.
The class structure will be interactive and fun, as the best way to learn something like speech is hands-on through activities and games. I am excited to see you all in class. |
Narrative Essays for Contests, College, and Camps
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Mr. Jonathan West will teach students how to write narrative essays for competitions such as the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and for applications to college and camps. During the class, students will learn how to demonstrate relevant personal qualities by capturing their unique experiences. The class includes 5 lectures (3 hours each) in week 1 mornings, with lectures and individual and group work.
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Key concepts:
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