Summer 2013
In the summer of 2013, Akiva interned at elevatr, a startup in NYC whose mission he shared. This article was written about Akiva’s internship. Akiva also reflected on his internship. That same summer, he began meeting with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to learn from them.
2014
During the 2013/14 school year, Akiva established and ran an entrepreneurship club at his middle school, which he called Vectorthink (see here and here for more). He began discussions to export this model to other schools in the U.S. and elsewhere. At the same time, Akiva taught himself C and Objective-C using textbooks and online resources.
Summer 2014
In the summer of 2014, Akiva completed Makeschool, an intensive full-time two-month game development academy in the Flatiron District. Akiva was the youngest participant in the academy, where many other participants where more than double his age. During the academy, Akiva was voted by his peers to have the best elevator pitch. Akiva developed a particularly complex iOS app, Darklight, a game about color and movement which can be found on the app store here.
Akiva is very proud to have interned during the summer of 2014 at a leading venture capital firm, Thrive Capital.
Upon entering high school in 2014, Akiva became more committed to hardware. In December 2014, he participated in his first hackathon where he was the youngest participant and where he and his team emerged victorious. They hacked the classic computer game of pong using the Thalmic Myo, an EMG sensor, allowing for control of the on-screen paddle using arm movement and connected the game to Phillips Hue Smartbulbs to visualize status of the game. See more in this article.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Akiva is very proud for his winning FollowPlants hack at HackDisrupt 2015.
Summer 2015
In the summer of 2015, Akiva interned as a software developer at Keen Home, a home automation startup, where he developed emulation technology for an in-development product. His software was deployed thousands of times to stress test the Keen Home backend.
He also continued an internship at Thrive capital, performing due diligence on early-stage investment opportunities, communicating his analyses directly to Thrive’s executives.
Akiva also hacked biology at Cooper Union’s summer STEM program. Along with his team, Akiva developed novel E. Coli, capable of responding to the presence of dangerous UV light by producing melanin.
2016 School Year
Akiva studied the dynamics of the C. Elegans nervous system using calcium time series data from Saul Kato. He began contributing to the OpenWorm project, run by Dr. Stephen Larson, to begin work on neuronal-analysis, a toolkit for analyzing and comparing neuronal timeseries data. In addition, Akiva interned with Dr. Christoph Kirst of the biophysics department at Rockefeller University, where he studied the learning process and the structure of the solution space of a classical recurrent learning algorithm. This work yielded new insight into how complex computations are learned and implemented in distributed neuronal circuitry. Akiva then interned under Dr. Adam Calhoun, a postdoc in Mala Murthy’s Drosophila Courtship and Accoustic Communication lab at Princeton. There Akiva worked on a visual tracking system for Drosophila moving about in behavioral assays. This project took advantage of modern machine vision technologies including tensorflow.