Indian school kids shine at Intel science fair

By Sunderarajan Padmanabhan

Newswave @ New Delhi

Young innovators from India proved their mettle once again with many of them winning top awards at the just concluded annual International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) organised by IT major Intel at Pittsburgh in USA in May.

Two teams – C.S.Mohammed Suhail and Swasthik Padma of Mangalore and Pranav Shikarpur and Siddharth Viswanath of Bengaluru have won the second place grand awards of $1,500 each.

Suhail and Swasthik have won the award in the category of translational medicine for developing an ultra-low cost pre-symptomatic diagnostic paper tool for protein energy malnutrition. Suhail is from St Aloysius Pre-University College and Swasthik from Vivekananda Pre-University College.

Pranav and Siddharth, in turn, have won the award in the category of Earth and Environmental Sciences for developing a portable and floating real time data acquisition device for lake water quality monitoring and mapping. The two are from Bangalore International Academy, Bengaluru. They have also won the US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s first place award of $5,000.

Besides the two teams, Ishita Mangla of DPS, New Delhi, has won the third place grand award of $ 1,000 and a scholarship from University of Amazon for developing an automated and inexpensive solution for visual acuity testing in pre-verbal children using deep Convolutional Neural Networks.

The other award winners are:  Kaushik Kunal Singh of Inventure Academy, Bengaluru (grand award fourth place of $500, USAID’s award of $5,000, China Association of Science and Technology’s award of $1,200, Samvid Education Foundations’s award of $500) Shinji Ghosh of South Point High School, Kolkatta (grand award fourth place of $500), Parth Raghav of K.R.Mangalalam World School, New Delhi (Association of Computing Machinery’s award of $3,000 and King Abdulaziz Foundation’s award of $1,000), Sachet Sathyanaranayan of National Public School, Chennai (Mu Alpha Theta award of $1,500) and Akash Manoj of The Ashok Leyland School, Hosur (Samvid Education Foundation’s award of $ 500).

In all, 25 school students of class 8 to 12 from different parts of the country had participated in the global fair pitting their brains against other children from 78 countries. The children had been selected after several rounds of rigorous screening.

The programme is part of a PPP between the Department of Science and Technology, the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and Intel known as the Initiative for Research and Innovation in Science (IRIS). The students compete in 17 subject categories in this annual event. (India Science Wire)