I’m Zach, a New Zealander studying math + CS at Vanderbilt University. I spent my first year here mostly working in quantum: I competed at and won various hackathons, I’m leading a team building a CubeSat to do quantum key distribution, and I recently presented my first paper at IEEE Quantum Week (on benchmarking a classical preprocessing phase necessary to embed on some types of quantum computers).

This year, I am also pivoting toward work more focused on AI (and wanting to help it go as well as it can!). At the end of last semester, I designed a Bayesian wildfire drone surveillance algorithm, and very recently started working on an AI society simulation to observe the emergent behaviors of large AI swarms.

I’m also interested in philosophy, making films, the competitive evolution of power and institutions, and being outdoors in NZ.

Feel free to reach out at: zachary.n.macaskill-smith [at] vanderbilt [dot] edu