Hi, I’m Avneesh!

Hi, I’m Avneesh!#

Welcome to my personal website! Here, you’ll find what I’ve been working on, as well as some of my Jupyter notebooks explaining quantum algorithms. Feel free to check out my GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube Channel, Portfolio, and Medium.

What I’m Working On#

Balloon Astrophyics Group @ University of Toronto

  • Working on the engineering design of GigaBIT (the Gigapixel Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope), a 1.5m visible/near-UV telescope which will fly in the stratosphere on a NASA superpressure balloon. GigaBIT will have the same resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope, but a field of view 80 times as large, and will act as an important complement to more recent space telescopes such as Euclid and the James Webb Space telescope, which observe primarily in the near Infrared.

  • Developing the pointing solution code in Rust, which serves as the gondola’s state estimation software.

  • Working under the supervision of Prof. C. Barth Netterfield, known for his work on the BOOMERanG experiment, which was crucial in providing high-resolution measurements of the CMB. This experiment helped determine the geometry and age of the universe, as well as its composition.

Mechanical Engineering @ Blue Sky Solar Racing

  • Senior member of the mechanical engineering subteam of UofT’s Solar Racing Design Team.

  • Developed a Python program to automate the stress calculation process for bolts in Blue Sky’s future generation solar cars, saving time that the mechanical team would have to spend analyzing the safety of the over 100 bolts that are expected to be used in the Blue Sky’s next solar car.

  • Assembled mechanical systems, such as brakes, latches, and suspension, in Blue Sky’s Gen XI solar car prior to testing sessions, allowing the team to evaluate the performance of these systems and identify design flaws before the biennial race in Australia.

  • Designing the rear suspension of Blue Sky’s next generation solar car using CATIA, and conducting finite-element analysis with ANSYS Mechanical to verify structural integrity and optimize topology.

Engineering Physics @ University of Toronto

  • Pursuing my undergrad in the most rigorous engineering program at Canada’s top university.

Projects#

Summer Research @ National University of Singapore

  • Worked at the Optical Materials and Devices Laboratory at NUS under Prof. Andrew Bettiol

  • Built an experimental setup, based on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), that could measure the thicknesses of SiO2 layers on silicon wafers with micrometer resolution using lasers.

  • Assembled optomechanical equipment and developed a LabVIEW program to control the equipment during experiments.

Logistics Optimization with Quantum Computing @ QWorld (Research Project RP-009)

  • Evaluated QUBO formulations of the Vehicle Routing Problem and its variants, with a focus on the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (CVRPTW)

  • Benchmarked the performance of these QUBO formulations using quantum annealers.

QOSF Mentorship Program [GitHub Repo]

  • Explored quantum algorithms to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem using D-Wave Annealers and Qiskit.

  • Compared the techniques and advantages of various QUBO formulations.

  • Teamed with Shantom Borah and Aniket Sanjay Sinha, under the mentorship of Vesselin Gueorguiev

MaxCut Problem [GitHub Repo]

  • Generalized QAOA to solve the weighted MaxCut problem using Qiskit, without built-in QAOA functionality from Qiskit Aqua.

  • Used Ocean SDK to solve MaxCut problem on D-Wave Annealers.

  • Compared runtimes between classical computer, D-Wave Annealers, and Qiskit QAOA with Qasm Simulator.

Breakthrough Junior Challenge 2020

  • Competed in the 2020 Breakthrough Junior Challenge, placing in the top 5% of global submissions.

  • Made a video explaining Lorentz Transformations and Special Relativity.

Wrote an article explaining superposition in the context of Quantum Computing

Instacart Consulting Project

  • Designed Web-Scraper to analyze customer reviews and identify key complaints

  • Recommended Solutions to improve shopping experience for Instacart Customers

  • Presented Recommendation Deck to Instacart.

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