SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Intel Science Talent Search Spotlights Whiz Kids
from Science News
Ten of the nation's most innovative scientists convened in Washington this week to receive their version of Olympic Gold -- temporarily putting aside their homework to do so. Erika DeBenedictis, 18, of Albuquerque won first place in the Intel Science Talent Search, a prestigious competition for high school seniors, at a gala held the evening of March 16.
DeBenedictis earned a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation for her work designing an autonomous navigation system that could help spacecraft travel swiftly and efficiently along an "interplanetary superhighway," using planets' gravity to catch a ride. Second place and a $75,000 scholarship went to David Liu, 18, of Saratoga, Calif. Liu wrote software to automatically search and organize digital pictures.
He trained a computer algorithm to recognize when certain features, like buildings, faces or the color green, were present in a picture, and wrote a program to display similar pictures in linked groups. ... Akhil Mathew, 18, of Madison, N.J., won third place and a $50,000 scholarship for his work on a class of complex numbers called Deligne categories, which combined algebraic geometry, representation theory and category theory.
Read more...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.