Meet Team Canada-ISEF 2023

Cindy Cheng

Waterloo, Ontario
Detecting hypoxia through the non-invasive monitoring of sweat lactate and tissue oxygenation

I am a 10th grade student from Waterloo, Ontario. My passions most prominently include the sciences–particularly biology and material sciences, playing instruments, and badminton. In the future, I wish to pursue an degree in the sciences and medical education to become a physician-scientist, because I wish to help others through science. As such, I enjoy developing research projects aimed towards solving problems in the healthcare industry. My inspiration for my project this year came from wanting to bridge the use of polymers and electronics to create a biomedical device. Through literature research, I was intrigued by wide variety of applications biosensors could be used for. In the future, I would love to continue to develop my innovation via larger studies or further technological development. To any students interested: I would definitely recommend participating in science fairs, regardless of your past scientific experience! Science fairs have enabled countless students to find communities of like-minded individuals and experiences to be remembered for a long time. My best advice would be to select an area of research in which you are truly passionate over one that seems more complex, and to not compare your work to that of others’.

Aditya Dewan

Mississauga, Ontario
SPRKD: Effective Knowledge Distillation for Deep Neural Networks via Saddle Region Approximation

Aditya Dewan is a Grade 11 student at the Woodlands Secondary School, Enhanced Program, Canada. His key interests and passions lie in the field of Artificial Intelligence, having worked as a Machine Learning Specialist for 2 years, and he aims to solve critical 21st-problems by employing deep learning methodologies. His project this year – SPRKD (Saddle Point Recruitment for Knowledge Distillation) – does exactly this, an alternate method of compressing large neural networks into lightweight, small form factors for widespread deployment. The idea for this spawned from a series of project replications, ranging from ADAM to BANs, which highlighted the limitations of current Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods. Further research revealed the “size bottleneck” – hundreds of critical, real-world problems being solved in theory by deep learning models, yet failing to be deployed and impact those affected the most in practice due to excessive size. Through SPRKD, Aditya aims to illustrate the potential of characterizing teacher models as proxies for loss landscape information, resulting in stronger convergence, higher generalizability, better performance, and ultimately, serves as a key step to enabling widespread AI impact in local communities and compute-restricted settings.

Max Du

Calgary, Alberta
A Novel Pre-Hospital Indoor Rescue Drone

My name is Max Du, I am a grade 10 student. I am the captain and programmer of the FTC team 10015 (First Tech Challenge) as well as electrical lead of FRC team 4421 (First Robotics Competition), I have enjoyed building six robots with my FTC team in three years, which won the Western Regional Championship Alliance Awards for 2 years, and was invited to the international tournament. Last year I sought to join my Real World Design Challenge team which won the United States Most Creative Award 2022. I was in charge of designing and testing the FEA (finite element analysis) and airflow of an innovative delivery drone. This experience of solving a real-world problem inspired me. I set out to innovate a prehospital rescue drone to help cardiac arrest patients. The ideation and engineering process was challenging but exciting like an adventure. It is most rewarding to see the current prototype is capable of helping people and its endless possibilities to be improved and simplified. From this project, I have learned that solving a problem for the community is meaningful. I encourage potential science fair participants to use their passion and skills to better the local community by starting an innovation project.

Keerthan Kamala Krishnamoorthy

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Detection of Harmful Microorganisms in Drinking Water using Deep Learning

Keerthan is an 11th grader from Fort Richmond Collegiate in Winnipeg, Canada. He enjoys technology and all things science, including machine learning, robotics, and physics. He is passionate about using technology to help people’s lives and solve real-world problems. He loves any opportunity to learn new things, or to share his knowledge. Outside academics, you can find Keerthan running, film-making, or staring through a telescope.

Krish Modi

Sarnia, Ontario
Pee Xylophone: A Novel Non-Invasive System to Measure Bladder Pressure

I’m Krish Modi, a grade 12 student from Sarnia, Ontario. I have been doing the science fair every year since grade 3 and have absolutely loved it! So far, I’ve won 2 gold medals, a silver medal, a best junior physics project prize, and recently the Youth Can Innovate Plus prize from my three years at CWSF. I got the motivation to create real change with my Pee Xylophone invention after my grandpa had the urodynamics test done on him when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Hearing about his experience with the excruciating and invasive test was heartbreaking. I’ve worked to create a non-invasive alternative that will restore patient dignity! For anyone starting a project, my only advice to them is to pick a challenging, but fun problem that pushes their problem-solving skills to their limits!

Annabelle Rayson

Sarnia, Ontario
Plankton Wars: An Innovative Analysis of Daphnia Genotype Biomanipulation for Algae Bloom Prevention

Hello, my name is Annabelle Rayson and I am a grade twelve student from Sarnia, Ontario, who is passionate about problem-solving, helping people, and improving the world around me. I am the Chair of the Sarnia Shoebox Project, a non-profit charity that provides holiday gifts for homeless women; the founder and president of my school social justice club; and chair of my high school’s community wide food drive planning committee. I also play violin, viola and alto and soprano saxophones and perform in my school’s concert band. I am the captain of my school’s curling team and volunteer as a youth curling coach. I was inspired to create my project after reading about the impacts of harmful algae blooms on Lake Erie and the communities that surround it. To expand my project, I would like to test invasive species and different types of nutrient pollution to see their impact on algae reduction and Daphnia magna biomanipulation. My advice to future science fair participants is to research! Read anything and everything you can on your topic and don’t be afraid to reach out to an expert for help; it may seem a bit intimidating, but they were once just like you.

Thomas Yang

Toronto, Ontario
Seeing Cells without a Lens: Compact 3D Digital Lensless Holographic Microscopy for Wide-field Imaging

Hello! My name is Thomas Yang and my project involved designing a compact 3D digital lensless holographic microscope for wide-field imaging. I found my interest in holography through my favourite book, Joseph Goodman’s “Introduction to Fourier Optics”, where I was fascinated by Professor’s idea of digital holography, that the shape of a material can be solved for from the interference of its lights through algorithmic processes. Subsequently, I delved deeper to find an application of holography in the field of microscopy, where the 3-D shape of cells provide essential information to cell diagnosis and inspections. For the future, I would like to get my hands on a 3-D printer, so I can make the design of my holographic microscope much more compact, portable, cost-effective, and accessible than it already is. I also hope to extend this technology to examine living cell samples, so that dynamic imaging of cell movements can be captured. For future students who also want to step into research, I would recommend going into any science book that interests you. You never know if a specific anecdote or unsolved question in the book would catch your eye and lead you to think further!

Tara Zhan

Vancouver, British Columbia
Hemistride: Design of a Low-Cost and Backdrivable Lower-Limb Exoskeleton for Hemiplegic Patients

I’m Tara, from Vancouver, BC. Half of the inspiration for my project, HemiStride, came from my lifelong love for engineering and tinkering. I’ve been building and crafting ever since I could hold a pair of scissors. The other half came from the countless hours I’ve spent in a physiotherapy office or the hospital that showed me the importance and beauty of medical technology. I get injured a lot as I’m a national-level tennis player, training 15 hours a week and competing in tournaments at least twice a month. My dream is to play college tennis while studying what I love at a top university in the US. Although my schedule is already packed with school and tennis, I’d like to continue my project next year with a focus on developing dynamic gait control.