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AST students places second in competition at MIT
By JAKE MUONIO
Academy of Science and Technology student Srikrishna Raghavan placed second this past weekend in the Regional Finals of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.
Raghavan, along with his teammate Timur Balbekov, who lives in Connecticut, presented their project at Massachussets Institute for Technology Nov. 7.
Siemens Foundation provides more than $7 million each year to support educational initiatives in the areas of engineering, technology, science and math. The Siemens Competition is administered by the College Board which also administers the SAT college entrance exam.
A total of 1,893 students registered for the competition, and 1,205 students and teams submitted their projects. Of those, 96 students — 36 individuals and 30 teams — were selected as Regional Finalists.
Raghavan and Balbekov met while taking part in a summer program at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The teammates examined the use of the Walsh-Hadamard Transform, which is used in digital information processing, including with cell phones, video and MRI machines. They studied whether or not there would be ways to speed up data transmission.
Raghavan compared one transmission method to shopping with a grocery list. The team focused on splitting up a big list into many smaller lists — coming up with the same end result when the “grocery list” data was transmitted both in pieces and as one entire list.
“We thought that both methods would perform equally, but both be faster than the original,” Raghavan said.
It turned out that by combining the two methods, the teammates were able to demonstrate dramatically improved performance.
Future applications for the research — and extensions of the research — could enable the creation of more compact technology, including hand-held MRI machines or a wristwatch that could record video, Raghavan said.
A win would have meant a $3,000 scholarship and a trip to the National Finals Dec. 4-8 at New York University. Instead, the junior received a $1,000 scholarship, and an additional $2,000 was awarded to the Academy of Science and Technology to be used to “support science, math and technology programs in the school.”
“I really thought it was a great experience. I got to visit MIT and I got to share the work with a lot of guys who share the same amount of scientific enthusiasm,” Raghavan said.
Raghavan said he plans to attend college for biomedical engineering, and that he was further inspired toward that career by other projects he saw during the competition.
More information on the competition can be found online at www.siemensfoundation.org
Raghavan, along with his teammate Timur Balbekov, who lives in Connecticut, presented their project at Massachussets Institute for Technology Nov. 7.
Siemens Foundation provides more than $7 million each year to support educational initiatives in the areas of engineering, technology, science and math. The Siemens Competition is administered by the College Board which also administers the SAT college entrance exam.
A total of 1,893 students registered for the competition, and 1,205 students and teams submitted their projects. Of those, 96 students — 36 individuals and 30 teams — were selected as Regional Finalists.
Raghavan and Balbekov met while taking part in a summer program at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The teammates examined the use of the Walsh-Hadamard Transform, which is used in digital information processing, including with cell phones, video and MRI machines. They studied whether or not there would be ways to speed up data transmission.
Raghavan compared one transmission method to shopping with a grocery list. The team focused on splitting up a big list into many smaller lists — coming up with the same end result when the “grocery list” data was transmitted both in pieces and as one entire list.
“We thought that both methods would perform equally, but both be faster than the original,” Raghavan said.
It turned out that by combining the two methods, the teammates were able to demonstrate dramatically improved performance.
Future applications for the research — and extensions of the research — could enable the creation of more compact technology, including hand-held MRI machines or a wristwatch that could record video, Raghavan said.
A win would have meant a $3,000 scholarship and a trip to the National Finals Dec. 4-8 at New York University. Instead, the junior received a $1,000 scholarship, and an additional $2,000 was awarded to the Academy of Science and Technology to be used to “support science, math and technology programs in the school.”
“I really thought it was a great experience. I got to visit MIT and I got to share the work with a lot of guys who share the same amount of scientific enthusiasm,” Raghavan said.
Raghavan said he plans to attend college for biomedical engineering, and that he was further inspired toward that career by other projects he saw during the competition.
More information on the competition can be found online at www.siemensfoundation.org
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