Alexandra Levinshtyen

Year in School
Freshman

Major
Computer Science

Research Interests

Research Mentor
Dr. Dakshita Khurana

Research/Engagement Experience
In the early summers of high school, I was a teacher’s assistant at Summer Academy in Minnesota. I demonstrated coding problems to students and aided students in their various engineering projects. I took extra care to ensure that the few girls in the coding and engineering classes were feeling included. I called out any sexist assumptions that the boys in the class would make and served as a role model for all of the students. In the next couple summers of high school, I served in a similar role for Camp Venom, a coding camp for middle schoolers, and MNMOC, a math camp for middle schoolers. Finally, in my senior year of high school, I was the Code Team Captain of my school’s FIRST Robotics team. In this role, I taught new members basic Java skills in an attempt to involve them more in coding and not just building. I showed them, especially the women, that coding was not as scary as it seemed. Now, I hope to continue building these types of welcoming and inclusive environments in the UIUC CS department.

Interests
I hope to research quantum computing, the full extent of its decryption potential, and cryptographic methods that would evade this full potential. True randomness is a critical part of developing secure encryption that would be immune to the future of quantum decryption. Ironically, quantum computing could be the key to true randomness. As such, with my strong background in abstract algebra and other mathematics and motivation and willingness to learn more, I would like to learn more about and pursue developing randomness extractors and both seeded and unseeded randomness extraction.

Project Title
TBD

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
My mom forced me to take a simple online coding class when I was 9 and that's when I decided this is what I wanted to do forever. Since then, I have become more interested in theory elements of computer science rather than just coding.

What social interests matter to me?
I am incredibly passionate about getting more women and LGBT folks involved in computer science and other male-dominated fields. As a queer woman, I have faced much discouragement when participating in these fields while growing up, and I hope to change this for the next group of students.

What is my most impactful college experience?
I went to Quad Day and got to learn about many different amazing clubs for everything under the sun! Although it was a hot day, I was incredibly excited to discover all that I could do.

These are a few of my favorite things!
According to my Discord bio, I am a fan of black holes, science fiction TV shows, dystopian novels, combinatorics, abstract algebra, D and D, and punk and alt rock.

Research Description
I will be learning about and researching quantum cryptography. After obtaining more background knowledge, I will be exploring obfuscation in the bounded quantum storage model, that is, how to hide encryption algorithms with only a limited amount of quantum storage.

Biography
I was born and raised in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. I have two siblings. My family got a dog named Raisin three weeks before I moved to college.