The 2021 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) was held virtually April 29 – May 21 and, as they have for more than 30 years, ASA members volunteered as judges for the projects.

ISEF is the world’s largest scientific competition, with millions of high-school students around the world competing to secure one of about 1,450 coveted spots. These spots are awarded to students who have advanced from local and regional fairs based on the quality of their projects.

Involvement in ISEF has been an outreach project of the ASA Council of Chapters since 1987. The council appoints an ASA-ISEF liaison, and the ASA provides a modest budget that includes travel expenses for one chapter member to travel to the fair.

Judging for ISEF ASA Special Awards in Statistics traditionally has three rounds. In Round 1 for ISEF 2021 (held virtually), the statistics judges screened 1,430 projects by 1,842 students from 64 countries. These projects represented 21 scientific and engineering categories. Of these, 150 projects that incorporated sufficient statistical details were selected for more detailed review using a quantitative rubric in Round 2. Fifteen projects were selected for Round 3 interviews based on the quantitative Round 2 scores.
The three projects selected from Round 3 based on the best use of statistics using a quantitative rubric are:

First Place ($1,500) went to Aditya Kendre, Cumberland Valley High School, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, for the biomedical engineering project ENBM035: “Employing Adversarial Machine Learning and Computer Audition for Smartphone-Based Real-Time Arrhythmia Classification in Heart Sounds.”

This project used a generative adversarial network (GAN) and transGAN subsystems to detect abnormal heart sounds to classify arrhythmia. Kendre also developed an app to be integrated into a smartphone. The project model testing, evaluation, and interpretation incorporated many key statistical approaches in an innovative engineering project.

Second Place ($1,000) went to Hannah Guan, BASIS San Antonio Shavano Campus, San Antonio, Texas, for the computational biology project CBIO008: “The Genetics of Human Aging: Predicting Age and Age-Related Diseases by Deep Mining High Dimensional Biomarker Data.”

In this project, the correlation pre-filtered neural network model was developed and tested yielding the best prediction accuracy among all tested methods, including neural networks with LASSO regularization, elastic net regularization, and dropout neural networks.

Third Place ($500) went to Sarah Cao, Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, Rolling Hills Estates, California, for the Plant Science project PLNT016: “Analysis and Prediction of the Spread of Invasive Plant Species in Relation to the Changing Environment.”

In this project, the random forest machine learning model was used to determine the relation between the spread of invasive plant species and various environmental factors and to predict future plant spread with promising accuracy.

In addition to the cash prizes, each winner received a one-year student membership to the ASA, including one-year subscriptions to Significance and CHANCE magazines.

Ten projects from students living in countries such as the US, Vietnam, India, and Russia received honorable mention.

Xinping Cui, president of the ASA Orange County/Long Beach Chapter, announced the three winners of the ASA Special Awards in Statistics during the ISEF 2021 Special Awards Ceremony, which was also virtual.

One of the social features of the in-person fairs that could not happen with this year’s virtual fair was the dinner traditionally hosted by the ASA; however, the ASA did have several “happy hour” Zoom sessions. The highlight of one of the sessions was special guests Susan Ellenberg and Ananda Jayawardhana, who provided their perspectives on early ASA involvement in ISEF.

Virtual Complications

There were several traditional special outreach tasks that are easy for the judges to complete in person but required special handling to accomplish in the virtual fair. For in-person fairs, CHANCE and Significance magazines are distributed to students and their teachers who attend the statistics symposium; however, in 2021, no symposium was held.

Another rewarding task at in-person fairs has been the distribution of donated statistics books to winners of the top projects. A subsequent article in Amstat News will describe the solutions for continuing the tradition of distributing books during ISEF 2021.