2014 E=mc2 High School Science Intel SemiFinalists

By Lucas Kang - Mathematics and Computer Science
That summer, I applied to and was accepted to the Wolfram Science Summer School (WSSS) – WSSS2012 was hosted at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. At WSSS2012, I met Stephen Wolfram, members of the Wolfram Science team, and numerous computer science enthusiasts from around the world, all with unique and interesting backgrounds. It was after talking to Dr. Wolfram for the first time that I decided to study long-distance cellular automata, or LDCA, a field of cellular automata that had not been extensively documented before. I began by created a nomenclature for LDCA, and started to study their basic characteristics ... Cellular automata (CA) have been utilized for decades as discrete models of physical, mathematical, chemical, and biological systems. The most common form of CA, the elementary cellular automaton (ECA), has been studied intensively in the past due to its simple form and versatility. However, ECA are constrained to evolve according to a neighborhood of adjacent cells, which limits their sampling radius and the environments in which that they can be used. The purpose of my study was to explore the behavior of one-dimensional CA in configurations other than that of ECA. Namely, “long-distance cellular automata” (LDCA), a construct that had been described in the past but never studied ... Read more...
By Tanya Lee - Mathematics and Computer Science
It all started with social media. Like many Facebook fans of my age, a significant part of my life was spent on social media. As we take knowledge from the infinite pool of cyberspace, cyberspace, in return, instilled appalling social habits, and my social interactions simply became competitions of who can glue eyes to their screen the most. Consequently, for me (and my 819 friends), my speech patterns rescinded to a level akin to “OMG LOL I have to get to class”. I lived in social media, knowing it inside and out ... In sophomore year, I had an opportunity to put my social media expertise to some use as a paid summer intern at a Silicon Valley startup that automatically tracks public opinions and sentiments from social media. Their system uses natural language technology to do sentiment analysis of consumer opinions about a brand or topic ... My initial job was to incorporate social media jargon into the system, especially the emotional expressions from Urban Dictionary. I was also assigned to test entries from Facebook fan pages, sorting positive sentiment from negative. I soon immersed myself into my work routine but noticed that the system always disregarded smiley faces (emoticons) as these are things beyond words, extra-linguistic symbols. As visible representations of emotion, isn’t that a missed opportunity to help gather sentiment? A happy face like :) usually denotes a positive tone of sentiment while a sad face :( a negative tone. Intuitively, it should help the system for the purpose of sentiment analysis ... This research presents a novel study of how emoticons can help sentiment analysis precision. Data analysis shows that emoticons alone cannot determine sentiments towards a brand and they can only be used together with other evidence. Further study has discovered a use of emoticons as counter evidence to block glaring errors in sentiment analysis ... Read more...
By Hannah McShea - Biology
When I was little I would get indignant when the distinction was made between "people" and "animals." I would pout and start talking taxonomy, informing some puzzled companion that actually, people are animals. When I read papers on intelligence and memory in slime molds last year, I was reminded of my childhood crusade to unite the animal kingdom. We share a common ancestry with slime molds as we do plants and animals. I began reading about emergence theory, and wondered if there wasn't something to be learned about human intelligence from slime mold intelligence. Research suggested that the intelligence of slime molds was emergent – arising from interactions among many simple and unintelligent components. I wondered, might studying the emergent mechanisms of memory and pattern recognition in slime molds elucidate the emergence of intelligence from repeated synapses in the human brain? ... I have taken amazing lecture classes, but research clarified my interest unlike any class has. I have learned in class about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the life cycles of stars, the hardly explicable formation of embryo from cell, and been awestruck. But research taught me about myself. My own fears, habits, abilities, and potential were thrown into relief in a new way. It astonished me that I could create new understand with an idea, some single-celled organisms, and a crate of petri dishes. There is nothing I would rather do ... Read more...
By Preksha Bhagchandani - Molecular Biology and Chemistry
My research began with a news article about PCB pollution in the Hudson River and its effects on a small bottom feeding fish called the Atlantic tomcod. Although this article was geared more toward evolutionary adaptations as a result of environmental pollution, I was drawn to its subtle elements of studying chemical exposure at the molecular level, and I continued to read additional articles and papers concerning toxicology and genetics ... My research utilizes Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as yeast, to visualize differences in gene expression following exposure to various concentrations of lead. Yeast was chosen as an ideal model organism to study genomic level changes because it is a eukaryotic organism, and it is simple to culture, grow, and control. Most importantly, it shares approximately thirty-one percent (1895 genes out of 6116 genes) of its genome with humans and the fully sequenced yeast genome is readily available. Since yeast is the model organism, any changes in gene expression seen in yeast should model what would be expected in humans in the corresponding homologs of the genes analyzed. Changes in gene expression were visualized using RNA extracted from lead-exposed yeast, synthesis of cDNA, PCR, and gel electrophoresis ... Read more...
By Tayler Rocha - Ecology and Biology
Living in the intermountain west, I believe that there isn’t a more important resource to both humans and wildlife as water. Along with my early childhood interest in science, I have always been concerned about the availability of water, remembering times when our well water was low, barely yielding enough water for bathing due to the diversion of surface water for agriculture, as well as worsening drought conditions. I was also worried about the overuse of water by humans for seemingly trivial reasons, with little regard to wildlife or habitat needs. After I learned about the BLM trying reverse decades of dewatering by reestablishing wetlands in the high mountain valley where I live, I became intensely interested in how both humans and wildlife would benefit from this unique management effort ... My study examines how temporary wetlands, called playas, can be beneficial to wildlife by serving as a rich food source for migratory birds, as well as a source of groundwater recharge for humans needs. Wetlands, particularly those in the West, have been in sharp decline for many years due to human demands, and are becoming less functional and more disconnected as wildlife habitat. By understanding how wetland habitats and groundwater are interdependent and linked, water application strategies can be developed that can support wildlife as well as the farming needs of humans ... Math as it is taught in the classroom has not captured my intense interest as has science throughout my years in high school. However, while conducting my research on this project, I realized that math is what allowed me to visualize and deduce my conclusions: it is the tool that validates and describes the differences and findings of any scientific endeavor ... I gained a tremendous amount of confidence when I realized that I had the ability to understand and use math as I conducted science, giving it a much deeper meaning than just textbook examples ... Read more...
By Laura Herman - Medicine and Statistics
Synesthesia, he said, is the union of senses otherwise unconnected in a “normal” brain. He described Albert Einstein using shapes instead of numbers to complete mathematical algorithms, and briefly scoffed at the absurd idea of colored letters. Could it be that none of my classmates saw our teacher’s name in purple with flecks of sandy brown? Were A’s not inherently fire-truck red nor Z’s metallic gray? Didn’t everyone find it efficient to memorize phone numbers according to their unique color palates? ... Confused and bewildered, I stumbled home, repeating over and over the word my teacher had mentioned so nonchalantly: synesthesia, synesthesia, synesthesia. Powering up my computer, I immediately began to read every article I could find on this mysterious “disorder,” “disease,” “condition,” or “superpower.” It seemed as though researchers did not even know how to classify my sixth sense. As it turns out, every day of my life, I've been wearing rainbow-colored glasses. Cemented to my eyes like irremovable contact lenses, they turn letters into colors, music into tastes, and time into space ... Read more...
By Brian Zimmerman - Biology and Physics
My project originated long ago, when I was barely an infant. Almost every day I visited the Museum of Natural History and had lunch underneath the blue whale after touring the museum, paying special attention to the dinosaurs. Ever since I was young, dinosaurs have held that special interest for me, not in the sense of big scary monsters of a world long gone, but more in the sense of marvels of nature, amazing creatures at the zenith of evolution ... when the time came to design my research project, I knew there was only one choice. I had to try and find out how dinosaurs moved ... Read more...
By Katherine Paseman - Medicine and Chemistry
When I was in the third grade, ten years ago, my mother constantly felt dizzy and tired. She finally sought medical attention and her blood was drawn for testing, but it wasn't until a week later that she was told that her hemoglobin levels were so low that she had to go to the hospital immediately. After a stressful series of months following some procedures, including many more blood draws from my anemic mother, she recovered and was able to return to her normal activities ... I became fascinated with the ... optical properties of blood we could leverage to conduct a wider range of tests ... My peers have informed me that the humanities are ever popular because "there's more than one right answer," so you can never be wrong. By contrast, in math and science classes, there's always a correct answer and, more often than not, an incorrect answer. In learning about methods of non-invasive blood analysis, I've learned that the room for creativity in science is not in the answer itself, but in the method of finding that answer ... Read more...
By Daniela Ganelin - Linguistics and Medicine
Each year, nearly 800,000 people in the US suffer strokes. Of these, about 38%, or 300,000, experience some degree of aphasia, or loss of linguistic abilities ... Regardless of symptoms, many aphasic patients show marked improvement over time, with some studies reporting up to 40% of patients recovering completely within a year of the stroke ... In this project, I analyzed the differences in word use between “well-recovered” aphasic patients (those that perform well on the Western Aphasia Battery) and normal control subjects on a discourse task. Although the aphasic patients exhibited near-normal performance on the word and sentence levels, they produced different patterns of text structure and word use than normal subjects. This project introduced a methodology for statistically analyzing these differences in word use. In the future, a similar approach could be used to develop a diagnostic tool to identify patients with discourse impairments, based on analysis of the words used in a short transcript of speech ... Read more...
By Sarah Shader - Mathematics
A year ago I investigated a mathematical problem relating to Latin squares. Most people, whether knowing it or not, have actually seen a Latin square at some point in their lives and many newspapers actually include partial Latin squares on a daily basis in the form of a sudoku puzzle. A Latin square is a grid of cells with numbers in each cell such that no number is repeated in any row or column, so any completed sudoku puzzle is really a 9x9 Latin square. Although Latin squares have been around for a while, providing entertainment in the form of puzzles to people ranging from Benjamin Franklin to high school students like me, there are actually quite a few open mathematical problems surrounding Latin squares. Latin squares have been used not only as puzzles, but also as tools to aid in eliminating bias in experimental design, and they are mathematically very interesting and have connections to areas like group theory and graph theory ... Read more...
By Courtney Wong - Astrophysics
I have always been naturally inclined towards mathematics and science, but a field as foreign as astrophysics seemed like a topic that I would never explore. It wasn’t until the spring of 2013 when I was introduced to the Science Internship Program at UC Santa Cruz, a program that primarily offers astrophysics internships, that I took interest in the topic. Instead of being turned away by the unknown world of outer space, I took it as an opportunity to take a chance and learn something new ... I was placed under the mentorship of Dr. Jonathan Trump, and I found out my project would be researching quasars, the extremely bright nuclei of some active galaxies, and their scattered light. I calculated the effect of this scattered light on the overall brightness of the galaxy in order to see if the scattered light was affecting the results of past research on quasars and their host galaxies ... Read more...
By Raj Raina - Graph Theory
Combinatorics is a field of mathematics that has always fascinated me. Specifically, graph theory, a branch of combinatorics, has always piqued my interest. In general, graph theory deals with the study of mathematical structures, modeled by vertices with edges connecting them. While these graphs can be very simple, they can also get exceedingly complicated in structure; indeed, there are very interesting properties we can say about these graphs. The field is both enormously complex as well as incredibly enlightening ... In the summer of ninth grade, I had my first experience with graph theory at a summer math camp called PROMYS. There, I researched the invariant measures of graphs under arbitrary permutations of vertices. An invariant measure is a certain quality of a graph that is preserved by any permutation of the set of vertices. In that project, the question at hand was the following: given a graph G, what methods can be used to determine if the graph has an invariant measure? Furthermore, what constructions of this invariant measure are possible? This topic is of importance in several issues relating to network connectivity. By examining the invariant measures on graphs, one can relate the network connectivity of graphs under, say, arbitrary permutations (or any other measure) and show possible relatedness between structures ... Read more...
By Ashwin Balakrishna - Mechanical Engineering and Optimization
In this paper, I describe the process and results of my study on the flight trajectory optimization of a continuously flying solar aircraft. Continuous flight is achieved by cyclic operation, where the trajectory is repeated indefinitely, typically every 24 hours. The word continuously is used in the theoretical sense, as continuous or perpetual flight is not achievable in practice due to degradation of batteries and aircraft components over time. The importance of flight trajectory optimization has been recognized in both general aviation and space applications. The prevalent class of algorithms for solving these problems are largely sequential in nature, where the differential equations that describe flight motion are solved in an inner loop while an outer loop performs the optimization of the control variables. These methods can be computationally expensive as they require repeated solution of the differential equations for each guess of the control variable in addition to calculation of gradients for the optimizer ... In this research, I built upon a simultaneous solution method called orthogonal collocation on finite elements to develop a robust trajectory optimization system with an effective initialization strategy ... Read more...
By Emily Damato - Medicine and Chemistry
Although scientists do not yet fully understand how memories are formed, a protein called phosphodiesterase 4D (PDE4D) is clearly involved. Some children are born with mutated, damaged PDE4D, which results in a genetic condition called acrodysostosis. Kids with acrodysostosis typically have learning disabilities as well as short fingers, short toes, narrow faces, and short height. Currently there is no treatment for acrodysostosis, but this research shows it may be possible to use a small molecule to help mutated PDE4D and treat acrodysostosis. These small molecules may also treat Alzheimer’s dementia, schizophrenia, depression, and Huntington’s disease3 ... Read more...
By Vishnu Shankar - Computer Science and Biology
Current computational devices and techniques are based on silicon microprocessors. Computer manufacturers have been increasing transistor density on computer chip microprocessors at a rate that approximates Moore’s Law, which states that the amount of gates on a single chip will double every two years. Unfortunately, the application of Moore’s Law has been predicted to reach an end because of the physical speed and miniaturization limits of silicon microprocessors. The advantages of DNA Computing include large storage capacity and an ample a supply of DNA, making it a cheap natural resource unlike the cost of fabrication of Si-based computers. Even though empirically it has been shown that DNA computation has slower cycle than a silicon system, the parallel processing capabilities of a DNA system is significant in solving NP-hard problems. Further motivations for studying DNA Computing or the construction of molecular scale computing devices include its scale. Biological systems through superior control have been shown to solve many complex problems while avoiding the inefficiency of current von Neumann architecture .... Read more...
By Ritesh Ragavender - Mathematics
I’ve always been interested in mathematics. It is the pinnacle of human logic and is unquestionably correct, leading to wonderful models of predicting weather and making transistors. I found math to be a beautiful art form with a personality; some equations are humble, some are lawless, and some are mysterious, teasing for further inquiry ... I have conducted research in representation theory, the backbone of many mathematical ideas in algebra, topology, and particle physics. A major part of this field is the interplay between symmetries and the algebraic objects which control them. In the 1980’s, Charles Dunkl introduced certain operations involving both derivatives (rates of change) and certain reflections naturally associated to the symmetry of ordinary Euclidean space. These Dunkl operators have proven useful in both physics and mathematics, where they are used to study quantum many-body problems, conformal field theory, Lie theory, and harmonic analysis. In my project, I studied new Dunkl-type operators better adapted to a type of noncommutative space, which is a space in which the multiplication of quantities does not satisfy the familiar relation ab = ba ... Read more...





University of Chicago
Professor David Mazziotti
Editor