Report on BT Young Scientist & TechnologyExhibition 2014 #BTYSTE

I spent so long queueing to have my book signed by Chris Hadfield that I had very little time to view the projects. However, I did mainly concentrate on the Technology section and there were a few projects which caught my eye:

• 
  Gearduino - this project was effectively an automatic transmission system for bikes. It used sensors on the pedals and an Arduino based controller to determine when the gears should be shifted either up or down  (hence the project name).
  The student who did this project told me that he has filed a patent application and once this is granted he will approach bike manufacturers to see if they are interested in bringing it to the market. As a regular cyclist I can easily how this could be a best seller.
• 
  Another cycling related project was Bike Radar - I didn't get a chance to speak to the students responsible for this project, but it seems that they developed a warning system for cyclists to alert them to the fact that cars are potentially on course to collide with them. It sounds like a great idea and is similar to the collision avoidance system which are currently available on high end cars.
• A very useful project was Gum shield communication device for players and managers. This project won the overall runner-up prize for developing a wireless communication device which could be embedded into a gum shield and would allow players to receive messages from the manager during the game. It seems to operate by generating vibrations in the gum shield which are then perceived by the player as sound waves. I can see this being used in several different sports.
• The entologic project developed a system which would tanalyse a program and turn it into a normal English explaination of what the program did. This should be useful for non-programmers who wished to understand what the program was doing.
• A similar project was Easy shell which developed a system for transforming a set of instructions written in normal English into a bash shell script which could be executed. I didn't get a chance to try it out, but the idea is definitely interesting.
• 
  Last but not least I was interested to see New Method for Card Counting in Blackjack - this project developed an improvement on the classical method of counting cards to improve the odds in a game of BlackJack. This project clearly has commercial potential. One of the students told me that his father has promised to invest in sending him to Las Vegas on a practical trial of the algorithm once he reaches the legal minimum age for gambling.

My personal highlights from the BTYSTE exhibition

While at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition last week, I had an informal wander around the exhibition hall and this is some of the exhibits that stood out for me. I did not have time to visit all projects so it possible that I missed some wonderful projects. I won't cover the Primary Science fair because I reviewed it earlier.

• I spoke briefly with one of the students behind the overall winning project and I was very impressed with how pleasant and down to earth he was. He managed to explain a complex project in simple and easy to understand terms. He also told me about his career plans and those of his partner - I have no doubt that they will achieve all of them.
• 
  The project which impressed me most, was done by a student from Avondale Community School which was entitled "Safe driving with the ice device". This project was clearly inspired by the cold weather around the time of last years exhibition. The student had developed a novel system to deal with the problem of windscreen de-icing during cold weather. The problem he spotted was the fact that water used for washing the windscreen will often be frozen and so he built a simple simple electric heater which could melt it. Then if the windscreen begins to re-freeze, the driver can simply spray some hot water onto the windscreen which will unfreeze it as well as washing it. He even took into account the fact that often the water in the pipes leading to the window washer and/or the nozzles can be blocked with frozen water and so he added a compressed air system to assist with unblocking it.
  I think this is an idea with a lot of potential and the student involved was very eloquent and well able to explain the merits of his system. Here he is pictured with his model car demonstrating the system.
• 
  Two young second year students from Desmond College in Limerick won the overall group runner-up prize for their project "InVigil8 -A Personal Portable Security System" which combined 8 different devices to help with personal protection. I don't want to seem dismissive of their achievements, but I was surprised to see that in most cases they had not actually developed any of the devices from scratch, but had instead adapted an existing device/alarm to a new usage pattern. However, what really did impress me (and presumably the judges) was the confident way that they could demonstrate their project. I think that these young students have a bright future in business even if they decide not to pursue a scientific career.
• Another project which was inspired by last years unusually cold weather was "Smart Pipe – An Automated Water Circulation Anti-Freezing System". This project implemented a system to stop pipes bursting during periods of freezing weather. The system they built had a motor to circulate the water within the houses plumbing system, this motor was automatically turned on when the temperature dropped below freezing point and this was effectively a less wasteful version of the old trick of leaving a tap running when freezing weather is expected. This trick is only effective when the water is slightly below its freezing point and so when the temperature dropped further the system automatically diverted water from the hot water tank into the cold water system. Since the cold water was already circulating the small amount of hot water added was dispersed and brought the overall temperature of the water only slightly above freezing.
• The winners of the IBM award were two students from Tipperary who had developed a database of recordings of health and diseased horse hearts. They combined their database with an existing pattern recognition system so that vets can now submit a sample heartbeat recording from one of the horses under care and the application will tell them what heart disease (if any) the horse is suffering from. Read more about their project here.
• The project "iCollapse:A mobile phone application for assisting those who are liable to collapse" should have won the prize for the most catchy project name is one was being given out. It also had a very clever and useful application - it uses the accelerometer and sensors in someone's iPhone to detect when the person had collapsed and then it will automatically contact a carer to come check on them. This is clearly an idea with great potential and I hope the student involves goes on to make it generally available.
• Another ambitious technology project was the student who developed the FreeFlowApp web site combining formal traffic reports with people tweeting about traffic issues on the twitter platform. I know from experience that this is a simple concept, but very difficult to implement in practice. At the exhibition the student had a working version of the web site - not only could I see him demonstrate it himself, but I was also able to access it myself on my phone. Unfortunately the site does not seem to be active anymore.

As well as the student exhibitors, there were also a number of exhibits run by professional science and technology organizations. Naturally I thought that the IBM stand was the best, but I was also particularly impressed by the stand run by Institute of Structural engineers. Their stand was not very complex, but they managed to get visitors actively involved in the real issues dealt with by structural engineers by getting them to build complex structures out of paper discs. As you can see from the picture some of the resulting structures were very complex and I think people seemed to be spending hours at their stand.

Delighted to see the enthusiasm for science from the participants at the PrimaryScience fair

Sometimes people complain that the current generation of young people are losing their interest in and enthusiams for Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM). However, anyoine who visited the Primary Science fair at the Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS this week could not possibly believe that these complaints are true.

Yesterday, I was scheduled to help demonstrate the Watson system at the IBM stand in the afternoon, so I came to the RDS early and spent the morning wandering around the exhibition. The first sction I visited was the PrimaryScience sectioon and the enthusiasm and energy of the young pupils demonstrating their work was wonderful to see. They were clearly very enthusisatic about their projects and rightly proud of what they had done.

All of the project were great, but the highlights for me were:

• The Mount Sackville project "Smart Energy" which looked at ways that the girls could be less wasteful of electricity both in school and at home. Of course I am biased by the fact that I was involved in launching this project, but the reality is that I had relatively little to do with the project.
  Once I introduced the girls to the topic they embraced the it with great enthusiasm and did not require much help. They used the current cost meters that I had set up for them to chart enetric usage and they summarised it in some wonderful charts. They also came up with great ideas for how they could be more effecient.
  I was also pleasantly surprised to see how prominently they  acknowledged the help they got from IBM.
• The boys who were presenting the Unlimited Energy stand had built a number of different devices that showed different forms of energy being applied. Unfortunately I didn't record the name of their school, but I couln't help being impressed by the amount of enegry that the boys were putting into their involvement in the science fair as the battled with each other for the honour of explaining how each of the devices worked. For example, the heat driven motor shown on the right was powering a propeller from the heat contained in a cup of coffee. What was really cool about this type of motor was that no steam was allowed to escape and hence the motor is suitable for use on submarines and other environments when steam escaping would not be acceptable.
• The FunBrayzia project from the boys at St Peter's National School, Bray was a very clever choice of project because they analysed the physics behing the various attractions in the funfair. I don't think it would have been too hard to get the young boys interested in funfairs. They had built very elaborate models of the various rides using and were using these to explain the physics involved.

Of course there is a lot more to the Young Scientist exhibition than just the PrimaryScience section. I will write up a fuller report later when I have a chance.

Synge Street Mathematicians scoop the honours again

I just heard the news that two 17 year old mathematicians Eric Doyle and Mark Kelly from Synge Street, CBS won the overall best project award at the annual Young Scientists competition.

I didn't yet get a chance to view their project entitled "Simulation Accuracy in the Gravitational Many-Body Problem", but this brief description makes it clear that it was a very complex project and I am sure they were very worthy winners.

However, what is really impresses me is that this is the third time in recent years that the overall prize has been won by a maths related project from this same school. I don't want to take away from the great work done by the students, but I think that the person who deserves most praise is their teacher Jim Cook who is apparently great at encouraging his pupils to take an active interest in Maths and Science.

In recent times, many commentators have been moaning about the declining interest in maths and physics among the current generation of teenagers who see as being "too hard". Clearly what this country needs is more teachers like this who can help their pupils to learn to love these very rewarding subjects.

Getting ready for BTYSTE 2012

The highlight of the holiday season for me is the annual BT Young Scientist exhibition. Irish people will all be very familiar with this long running event which happens at the start of each year, but foreigners are sometimes surprised to hear that a science competition for school children generates such interest and excitement that event receives over 40 thousand visitors and the announcement of the winner is normally the lead item on that night's national TV news.

For the last few years I have had the privilege of helping run the IBM stand at this exhibition. It is always invigorating to meet young people with such obvious passion for learning about science. I always go away from the event with renewed confidence that Ireland will have a bright future with youngsters like this joining our workforce in the future.

IBM will have a significantly larger stand this year and very exciting plans for what we will be demonstrating. The dedicated  blog has just re-opened for business and will carry all of the details.

My personal role on the stand will be in helping demonstrate the capabilities of IBM's Watson technology  which recently made headlines by winning the Jeapordy TV game show against the best human competitors. The video explains a little why IBM believes that the technology developed for a simple game can be adapted to solve real world challenges.

Are the weather forecasts in Ireland really as bad as people complain?

The weather in Ireland is notoriously changeable. As a result of this the common perceptions is that the professional weather forecasters often fail to accurately predict the weather even a few days into the future. However, it is hard to find definitive data about how accurate or not the weather forecasts are.

A quick search of the Internet will reveal several sites giving confident predictions for what the weather will be in the future and/or listing what the weather was at various dates in the past. However, very few of them reveal what their past predictions were and so it is difficult to find an objective measure for how much confidence you should place in a particular forecast.

I thought this would make a very interesting project for the BT Young Scientist competition for my daughter and a few of her friends. Unfortunately the judges did not agree and they rejected their entry into the competition. However, in anticipation of their project being accepted, I created a simple batch job that fetched weather forecasts from three different Internet sites each day and saved them in files for later analysis. Since the data was being collected anyway, I thought it would be a shame not to do anything with it and so I decided to a short bit of analysis which I write up here. If you don't want to bother reading all of the blog post the short summary is that the forecasts are indeed not very accurate.

When choosing the sites to use I was more influenced by how easy the data was to collect than by whether or not the source was authoritative. For example, the Met Éireann are the official forecasting service of the Irish Government, but their forecasts are deliberately translated from numerical predictions into a forecast that humans can easily understand e.g. "rain will spread from the west and become heavy by nightfall". It is very hard to do any statistical analysis on forecasts like that, so I deliberately chose three services which provided numerical forecasts in a format that was easy to parse:

1. The Yahoo weather service is widely used. By fetching the contents of this URL each day I was able to retrieve an XML file with details of current weather conditions in Dublin, Ireland as well as their forecast for the weather the next 2 days.
2. Weather.com is the weather service provided by the well known Weather channel and it provides weather data and predictions for all parts of the globe. By fetching this URL I got an XML file with their current weather data for Dublin as well as a prediction for the next 4 days.
3. WeatherOnline is not quite so well known a weather prediction site, but they make their data very easy to retrieve. By fetching this URL, I was able to get a CSV formatted file with current weather conditions in Dublin and a forecast for the next 5 days.

I have collected about 2 months worth of data at this stage. Initially I decided to analyse the accuracy of the WeatherOnline data for the practical reason that it was easier to transform CSV files into spreadsheets than to transform XML files.

The first thing I looked at was rainfall predictions. The following chart shows the predicted rainfall (on the Y-Axis in millimetres) plotted against the actual observed rainfall (on the X-Axis). If the forecast was perfect all the dots would be on a straight line with a 45 degree slope. I don't think that anyone would expect the forecast to be perfect, but I must admit that I was personally surprised at how poor this forecast is. I calculated the correlation coefficient between  the forecast and actual data and it came out at 0.28 - the general rule of thumb would be to interpret such a low correlation figure as "there may be some small association between the figures". If I looked at the prediction from 5 days before rather than the prediction from the day before the correlation coefficient goes down to 0.07 - this is normally interpreted to mean that there is no association between the prediction and actual values.

Rainfall Prediction v Actual (mm)

The next parameter I looked at was temperature. The following chart show the actual temperature plotted against the predicted temperature from the day before and from 5 days before.

I think you would agree that the temperature predictions seem to be a little better than the rain predictions and this next chart shows the predicted temperature readings from the day before (in degrees Celsius on the Y-Axis)  plotted against the actual temperature on the X-Axis. This is not the straight 45 degree line we would hope for, but at least there is some association between the two. Indeed the correlation coefficient is 0.33 which is jut high enough to indicate that there is a medium strength correlation.

Predicted Temp v Actual Temp

However, the team at WeatherOnline should not be too proud of this result because the temperature in Ireland does not swing very much from day to day so it should be easy to predict. The average error in their temperature prediction was 2.66 degrees.  I am sure that they use a very sophisticated prediction methodology, but if instead they simply predicted that the temperature tomorrow will be the same as today, their average error would only increase to 2.76 degrees.

I have only scratched the surface of this topic. If the girls' project had been accepted they would probably have done a much more extensive analysis. Areas that would be interesting to tackle would be:

• Analysing the other factors of the prediction e.g. wind speed and direction, pressure etc.
• Looking at different weather prediction services to see if some are better than others.
• Looking at longer time scales. Because of the way I am collecting the data it is not possible to go back into the past and collect historical data, but if anyone knows of a data source showing old weather predictions I would love to analyse this.
• Looking at similar prediction accuracy in other parts of the world. For example, the weather is an extremely popular topic of conversation among Irish people, but an Egyptian colleague assures me that Egyptian people rarely discuss weather among themselves. I guess a discussion of the weather among Egyptians would quickly become boring since most days are warm and dry. Presumably weather predictions in Egypt are probably more accurate than in Ireland (but maybe nobody bothers to read them).

If anyone wants to learn more about this you can download the raw data here.

BTYSTE project about Smarter Energy kicks-off

Yesterday I visited Mount Sackville primary school to help get them started on their Smarter Energy project for the BT Young Scientist &Technology Exhibition. I introduced them to the concepts behind the IBM Smarter Planet campaign using a set of slides that had been specially adapted to be understandable by that age group. I was delighted to see that they had no trouble in understanding the message.  They were very enthusiastic and seemed excited to be involved.

I also helped them use the lighting efficiency tester that I developed as part of the recent Hackday to measure the efficiency of a number of different types of light bulbs. The device was very popular. Children of that age love to get hands-on with technology (actually when I think about it men in their late 40s still love to get hands on with technology).

My colleague Fred Raguillat joined me for the visit because he has experience from running a similar project with Dunboyne national school. After we left the class we configured the Current Cost meters that they are going to be using to monitor their electricity usage for the duration of the project. All went smoothly, once we figured out how to work around a problem with the bridge not interacting properly with the DHCP server on their network.

I look forward to seeing their results at the exhibition in January.

I have two selfish reasons to be delighted that Alexander Amini won the overall prize at the young scientist:

1. He is a local boy from Castleknock College (although he only recently moved to Ireland)
2. His mother Lisa is a colleague in IBM

I tried a few times to see Alexander's project when I was at the exhibition yesterday, but I was not able to get near the stand because each time I came by he was busy talking to judges - I should have realized then that he was in the winning for a big prize. I will try meeting him again today, but in the meantime here is a short video of him talking about the project.

My favourite project from the BT Young Scientist Exhibition

I will be helping to run the IBM stand at the Young Scientist exhibition tomorrow and so I decided to drop in for a quick visit this morning to check how things are going. I have been to this event many times and so I should have know what to expect, but once again I was blown away by the energy and excitement of this event.

Smart Helmet with built in Arduino

I had a very quick look at the projects and, one project which caught my eye was  "Cycle helmet with built-in sensor controlled indicators", which was the work of a second year student in Gonzaga College. This project involved adding some sensors and an Arduino micro-controller to a cycle helmet so that the helmet could automatically detect when the cyclist was going to turn left or right (by the inevitable tilting of their head) and automatically turn on the indicator lights. In addition the helmet included a gyroscope which was used to detect when the turn was completed and the indicator lights should be turned off. The final touch was the addition of an accelerometer whick controlled the braking light.

I think that this is a really useful gadget which I would use (unfortunately he is not in a position to accept advance order yet), but what really impressed me was how such a young student was clearly very well informed about the technology scene. When he found out that I knew about Arduino devices he immediately launched into a discussion about the limitations of the USB interface on the board (the quick summary is that it doesn't quite match the formal interface specification). He also gave me pointed to some web sites for buying components and advised me on how to tackle a project I am planning with my recently acquired weather station.

DISCLAIMER: I did not get a chance to see all of the projects (or even a small proportion of them) so there may be many better projects - I will await the results of the formal judging which will be announced this evening.