The Honors Thesis Journey Part Two: Jocelyn Velazquez

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Jocelyn Velazquez kicked off her thesis project earlier this year and first spoke with us in November about her progress. Her research focuses on quantum information science and graph matching, and she has been working alongside a PhD student through the Undergraduate Research Volunteers program.

When we last spoke with Jocelyn, she was focused on completing her literature review and was in the early stages of implementing the quantum algorithm. We had the chance to catch up with her again after she presented at the 2025 Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference.

Q: What progress have you made since we last spoke? 

Since the last interview, I've been mostly working on debugging the algorithm and making sure that it works as expected. And this has involved a lot of math and just making sure that the outputs are somewhat what we expect. And during this process of debugging, we realized that there was some unexpected behavior with how the graphs are being processed. And that was skewing our results. 

Previously, the algorithm was achieving 100% accuracy on isomorphic strong irregular graphs, which is what we would hope to see. But then because of this behavior, if we were to shuffle the labels of the graph while keeping all the edges the same, the accuracy would decrease, which is not what we would expect.

Q: What are the next stages of your project since encountering the problem? 

Well, since we know what the issue is, and we know some of the possible solutions in the last couple of weeks, we're going to work towards implementing those solutions or identifying if this graph isomorphism problem is even solvable, which is pretty exciting. But there's a lot to do in these last few weeks.

Jocelyn presenting at MassURC 2025. Photo: Eva Trainer

Q: How was your experience at MassURC?

It was really exciting. Earlier, when preparing my poster, I was really anxious because I didn't have the results that I wanted to show. We just discovered the bugs and behavior right before MassURC, so I was worried that I wouldn't have any results to show. However, it was really fun to discuss the background, the methods, the current results, the issues, everything relating to it, and it was just really fun to share that information and have people engage with it and ask questions. I also felt really supported because several members of my lab came and also friends, coworkers, and even the professors, so it was a lot of fun.

In the final weeks of the semester, Jocelyn will be completing her thesis project, and after graduation, she will be joining Google as a Software Engineer. Great work, Jocelyn!