Congratulations to Elwood-John H. Glenn High School senior Rithika Narayan who has been selected as a 2021 Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar, with her project titled “Machine Learning on Crowd-Sourced Data to Highlight Coral Disease.” Rithika is among 300 high school seniors who were selected as scholars from 1,760 applications.
Additionally, Rithika, recently won first place in environmental science in the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium program, earning a Long Island JSHS 2021 Regional Finalist title. She has been be invited for the last round of competition on Saturday, February 20th, 2021.
The Regeneron Science Talent Search provides students with an opportunity to present their research on a national stage while celebrating the hard work of young scientists.
Rithika researched how machine learning, which focuses on the development of computer programs and artificial intelligence, can be used to address environmental concerns. In this case she modified the Facebook algorithm, Mask R-CNN, to detect the presence of different coral diseases.
Her dedication to the project, which she began researching in summer 2019, has since earned her several noteworthy accolades. She recently won first place in Environmental Science in the 2020 Long Island Science and Engineering Fair, was named a 2020 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair finalist. Her project has also been recognized by the Journal of Emerging Investigators.
Rithika also recently won a mini-research grant through the New York Institute of Technology, which she said she plans to use to help further refine her algorithm."Training machine learning algorithms often requires a large amount of computing bandwidth, which is not possible to achieve using just my personal laptop," she said. "As a result, I have rented computing power from Amazon Web Service’s remote computer clusters in order to carry out my research."
Rithika hopes that her research, which she is currently expanding upon to recognize other infectious diseases, can lead to industry advancements with the help of institutions like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According to Regeneron Science Talent Search, “Scholars were chosen based on their exceptional research skills, commitment to academics, innovative thinking and promise as scientists, and hail from 198 American and international high schools in 37 states, Puerto Rico, Chinese Taipei, and Singapore.”
Forty of the 300 scholars will be chosen as finalists later this month. Finalists will then compete for more than $1.8 million in awards from Regeneron.
In addition, Rithika was also recently announced as the John H. Glenn High School Class of 2021 valedictorian. For the past three summers, she has also interned at several biochemical companies, including Angion Biomedica Corp in Uniondale, as part of the Independent Science Research program.
After graduation, Rithika will continue her passion for research and pursue a degree in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science in Pennsylvania.
The Elwood School District congratulates Rithika on this outstanding achievement!