Michelle Hua, 16, of Troy, Michigan, won the top award in the 2021 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the largest global high school competition.
For her discovery of an artificial intelligence-based algorithm used for human action recognition, Hua received the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award. She used human silhouettes to design and implement a deep learning framework that outperforms all similar state-of-the-art algorithms.
There were two Regeneron Young Scientist Awards of $50,000 apiece. Catherine Kim, 18, of Jericho, New York, created a hierarchical machine learning model able to predict adverse drug reactions with 91% accuracy.
Daniel Shen, 17, of Cary, North Carolina, developed an AI-powered facial-cue control module. The high speed system can be used to accelerate scientific discoveries and medicine research driven by large amounts of temporal data. The algorithm has been adopted by researchers in Sepsis Shock diagnosis and Hurricane predictions.
In total, more than U.S. $5 million was awarded to finalists, evaluated on their projects’ creativity, innovation, and level of scientific inquiry. The competition featured over 1,800 young scientists representing 49 states and 64 countries across the world. The 2021 event also marked the first time in its more than 70-years the competition took place virtually instead of in-person.
