And the Intel ISEF winners are…

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The 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), which was held in Phoenix, Arizona, concluded May 17.  This year, approximately 1,600 high school students from more than 70 countries and territories competed for more than $4 million in prizes. The winners were recently announced.

Congratulations to the winners of the Statistics category of the competition, awarded by the American Statistical Association:

1st Place

Uttara Chakraborty of Chesterfield, MO

A New Stochastic Optimization Algorithm with Adaptive Penalty and Its Markov Chain Analysis.

2nd Place

Shreya Mathur of Oxford High School in Oxford, MS

Identification of Biomarkers for the Early Detection of Lung Cancer using a Novel Statistical Test

3rd  Place

Andrew Jin, of The Harker School in San Jose, CA

Breast Cancer Prognosis through Gene Expression Profiling and Tumor Morphology

These winners received cash awards, along with software, books and other prizes from JMP.

And, special congratulations to the winner of the Gordon E. Moore Best of the Best award (and $75,000!): Ionut Budisteanu of Romania. Ionut was recognized for using artificial intelligence to create a viable design for a low-cost, autonomously controlled (self-driving) car.

The full list of finalists and additional information on this year’s fair is available at the Intel ISEF Home Page.

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Mike Clayton wrote:

ISEF 2013 was inspiring, as this was my first time as a "Judge" for one category (not stats, but materials engineering and biotech). The cooperation between high school students and the many research labs around the world was impressive, so that dangerous biotech experiments could be designed and results analyzed by the students, with supporting research lab doing the actual runs. DOE was key to majority of the projects, some run at home, some in school labs, and many in university or government labs. Some students, based on earlier wins at local competitions, were taken as interns in these labs to augment their work. Scientific method was clear in all displays, and interviews showed that researchers really could talk about all the details, and suggest future research directions. Thanks, Intel, for your efforts over many years.