Trip to Intel Science and Engineering Fair
I decided to "blog" about my experiences going to judge the NSA Science of Security award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). I'm excited to go. It's my first time going to this event which I have heard about for years. I first heard about it early in freshman year, as a neighbor in the dorm was a finalist or winner (1999?). These high school students do some advance research to make it to the pinnacle of high school science fairs. It should be great to see the boards, both the cybersecurity ones and the many others. The excel file that lists the awards has 1700 students!
I'm heading to Pittsburgh tomorrow a fairly common; though not recent drive for me. The government materials are ready, but I still have to pack.
Adam
Day one of ISEF is over. It was a full day. Drove to Pittsburgh, not anything particularly noteworthy there. Arrived and eventually found the the booth. It was already setup, which was awesome. We helped put out the paper materials, ie swag. Sure a SoS trifold is swag. We worked the booth from 2pm to 6:30. Lots of students, school teachers, and even a few parents dropped by. Lots of interest in NSA. Went through about all of the HR materials sent with us. Many questions about what fields should they focus on in high school and in particularly college as to be desirable by NSA. Attending the ISEF is a great way to encourage students to take classes and learn the skills that NSA needs. I truly think that after today's experience talking with all the students, that NSA should be more involved with these events. These are formative years.
The most interesting fact i learned was that one of the students talked about using cryptol. Which is an NSA, R2, funded language for algorithms and formal methods. So really cool seeing something we produced being used by someone with no affiliation. Just awesome.
We closed up shop at the booth and went to the opening ceremony. Wow, kinda crazy. Pre ceremony entertainment was xpogo. An extreme pogo student team. (picture attached) I can now say, I seen people do pogo over a 7 foot high rope and do a 360 flip on a pogo. The speakers were less xtreme. CEO of the Intel Foundation, the Intel Futurist, and a CMU professor who invited captcha, recaptcha, and duolingo. These are pretty amazing inventions. And the concepts could be applied to much. He took captchas and and instead of just wasting all that human brain power, they are now used to help google OCR the world's books. Words that the computer couldn't recognize are now done by humans as they prove they are humans. Along with duolingo, his solutions often are win win setups where both parties contribute and both gain. The ceremony ended with a shotout to all the countries attending. 70 some countries from around the world and six continents. (picture attached) There are 1702 student researchers presenting their work. Representatives from each carried a poster on stage and they all assembled. It was like the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
That is all for today, its been very cool and a great experience.
Day 2 is about to begin. Another sunny day in PGH. Today's task is to reduce the number of projects to a short list for tomorrow. We get to visit the booths without students there.
Oh, my room may have the view of the highway up close. I could actually be closer, there are rooms. It was still pretty quiet and I slept well, the result of normally sleeping within view of I95.
Any cool projects worth checking out? I competed last year but this year they are not holding alumni viewing until public day.
Any cool projects worth checking out? I competed last year but this year they are not holding alumni viewing until public day.
Yes, there are multiple great projects spread across the categories. It's hard to just recommend a few.
Day 2 is now complete and I'm back in my hotel room for the night. This was another full day of activity. The morning started with a walk across the Allegheny River to the convention center. We successfully competed the registration to SAO (special award organization) judges. What this means is that we have an additional name tag. The first tag said sponsor and with a pewter ribbon that said sponsor. The new name tag has a red judge ribbon. The SAO judges have red while the grand prize judges have blue. Not that I expect to ever get one, but nobel prize winners have green. [A side story from the opening ceremony, the three of us we seated in the same row as the group of nobel prize winners (4 or 5). I was definitely not in the same league. I can also say that I had move my legs out of the way of nobel prize winner when he cross the row)]
We also discovered the the SAO judging room. This is a private but a huge room with tables. Each organization has a table with a fairly large sign. Our sign says Research Directorate and we are seated next to, but still distant, ONR. A few other gov agencies we see such as EPA and USAID. I didn't see DOE even though there are lots of energy related displays.
The main activity of the day was to take our long list of possible of refine it to a top ten ish to interview tomorrow. Today's review session is posters and judges only. There is no students or anyone else in attendance. This helps to quickly focus on the projects. By dinner, we had reviewed all of the projects and made our list of those we would talk to on Wednesday. We did notice that many organization were leaving small items at the posters for the students. Most of them were small thank you cards saying that such and such organization appreciates their research or some small item like a pin. This is something we can do in the future too. Like many student meetups, pin trading appears to happening here too.
Hey Look, Pittsburgh has the path to logic. |
We took sometime to look at the research posters in fields not related to cybersecurity. There are many high quality projects that are advancing science and engineering. I do not envy the judges for across disciplines awards. I would help extremely hard to compare a renewable energy project to one in microbes to mathematical modeling. It was also great to see a college friend who was a grand prize judge.
An update on the NSA booth. I didn't spend much time there today as most of the day was filled with the research judging. I am grateful for the wonderful support we have in manning the booth. Being a judge and in the booth would be two difficult things to juggle today. Our last Science of Security handout was given out early today. But in general, today was slower pace than yesterday. Students were generally not at the convention center, as there was nothing required. (tonight was a student mixer at Stage AE and a adult event (mixer?) at Heinz Field. Anyway, we looked around at some of the other booths next to us. Several colleges were recruiting and WVU had some very interesting displays and items. For example, they had these ghost spheres that are tiny spheres that swell when put in water and since they have nearly the same reflectivity was water, a causal observation is they are invisible. Its really cool when they pull them out and they appear and when they toss them back in the giant beaker of water they just disappear. They also had these white plastic beads, that appear white, except, maybe they arn't. When they are exposed to UV light, the higher energy light waves excite something inside, and cause the beads to reflect colors. Its temporary as the energy dissipates, the beads revert back to white. Even with these cool things, I heard from the students that yesterday our booth was one of the busiest if not the.
Time for bed as tomorrow starts early. So pictures will have to wait till tomorrow to post. Leaving the hotel at 7:15 to be prepared to start interviewing students at 8am.
Day 3 was another full day at the ISEF. It began bright and early. More precisely it began early. Today's weather was overcast so it wasn't a particularly bright morning. Leaving at around 7:15 we walked over to the convention center, where I ate breakfast in the few min before the beginning of the first judging session of the day. Today was the day where the students were at the posters for the entire day. 8am to 5pm. Being an SAO (Special Awards Organization) Judge meant that the the first session 8am to 9am was for us. We started with the students closest to the judging room, the students in the Behavior category. Relevant topics for foundational cybersecurity is broader than just the cybersecurity subcategory, and today we evaluated projects in Behavior, Software, Embedded Systems, and Robotics. Many of the students were researching areas that Science of Security funded researchers are also working in.
At 9 am the exhibit floors opened for the judges of the grand prize, ie the blue ribbon judges. These judges have scheduled 15 min sessions with the students. We were allowed to talk with the students during sessions when they were not scheduled. While they didn't have copies of the schedule for us, the schedule was posted and I took photos of it with my phone so we effectively refer it it anytime. There was one time, when I was trying to figure it out on my phone and then realized that I was standing next to the board. The giant board (still smaller than the SoS Research Network Map for those at Hot-SoS) was nice to use. By lunch time we were able to meet all the students except for 3. At lunch we returned to the SAO room where discussed our impressions so far and ate lunch. After lunch, the session resumed. We were able to meet with our last 3.
It was incredible rewarding meeting with these students. They were passionate about their research area. What we noticed is that often they had skin in the game in wanting to solve these problems as they had local impacts to them. It appeared to be more than just an assignment. The projects were great pieces of work and it is easy to forget that the students are generally between 15-18 and not graduate students. I hope that these student continue to pursue their research ideas. They have the potential to influence in the world in short order.
After completing our interviews, the three of us discussed the projects and we caucused. (the schedule had time for the grand award judges to caucused, so our discussions shall be called caucuses too. I never lived in a state with caucuses instead of elections). We found ourselves in mostly in agreement and referring to the award criteria was a way to remind what we were judging on and help bring consensus. Our team lead filled out the paperwork and delivered it to the judging room so that it could be made official. We had an 8pm deadline.
As we were completing the judging part, our colleague arrived with more materials for the booth for the next day and as I result we saw some organized crazyness. We decided to meet to transfer the resupply of 1000+ SoS handouts from his car to the booth. The location for the drop off was the convention center passenger pickup area. The timing turned out to be exactly when the 1700 students were released. It appeared most boarded buses to take them back to area hotels. There were so many students going to the various bus stations with charter buses filling up and moving and replacements coming in. Assuming 1000 of the students took a bus (a conservative estimate), and 50 passengers per bus, that's 20 buses being loaded and departing in just a few min. Considering it was day 3, the students went to the right stops and everything worked efficiently. Pretty nice.
Another opportunity presented itself. The Intel booth has 4 Oculus Rifts for people to try on. The moment we were passing, 2 were empty. All previous times, there were long lines,but at this point, the students were still required to be at their boards. Two of us tried them on. I had never strapped one on before and I wanted the experience. What an experience! It gives an effective 3d image, but I incredibly struggled with motion sickness. I really wanted to complete the short demo, but I was unable to. Bleah, it wasn't fun one bit. My brain still feels a bit off and its been 5 hours. The rest of the staff and other adults felt the same. I wasn't alone.
Tomorrow is a little later start than today, but only by half an hour and its going to be another long long day. Its public day, everyone can visit and supposedly 3500 school children will descend. I mean attend. Also the students won't find out that they won our prize until tomorrow night at the award ceremony. I can't wait.
Oh, did I mention there is lots of walking and standing. According to my Microsoft Band.
Monday: 6,360 steps; 3.1 miles
Tuesday: 13,614 steps; 6.59 miles
Wednesday:12,018 steps; 5.82 miles
Hmm, accidentally closed my tab with my entry and finally having time to write again, a few weeks later. I remember most of this long and memorable day.
Day 4, Thursday was public day. This mean thousands of area school children descended on the fair. It appears that most of the kids were middle school age. Teachers also attended from far and wide; from much further than I would have expected. I had expected that day would have been filled with herds of kids, with screaming and running. However, the day was anything like that. Each school group had a scheduled, where they went and at what time. This was extremely effective at distributing the children so no one area became crowded. I could hear teachers being, you have 15 min here or until 1:30. The children attended the two exhibit halls where the ISEF finalist were at their booths, the Expo Fair, where I was at with the NSA booth, and educational classes. I didn't attend the classes, so hard for me to describe them, but I would put it like science shows on various topics.
My role for the day was to be at the NSA booth and talk with the visitors. Most of the day, the booth received a steady and not overwhelming stream of visitors. There were a few types of visitors. The teachers were mostly looking for materials for class and opportunities for students. We had somewhat good materials for that, but enough. They liked the IOSS materials and the IOSS DVDs. They also liked the materials on the Stokes Scholarships, NSA High School Work Studies, NSA Internships, and COOP. (Later, at IEEE S&P, I would hear from a college student that she wished she knew about the NSA COOP program earlier so she could have done it). The middle school students were mostly looking for swag, which wasn't us. But the adventurous students did come up to talk. Number #1 questions was why were we at ISEF. The answer was that we giving an award that night to promote scientific research in cybersecurity. But since we were there, we also had the booth to provide information about NSA and materails about protecting oneself online. There were two questions that were very unexpected and somewhat common. The first was usually about launching rockets and the space shuttle, they were reading an extra "A" into our name, as in NASA. (I did ask my NASA friends, they don't get questions about Intelligence Collection). These questions were a good segway into answer for the other unexpected questions; "What do you guys do?" At first, I thought the questions were about the Science of Security and what specifically I do, but it was more general, what is the mission of NSA. So the answer would be about NSA's mission; NSA helps defend the nation through safeguarding Department of Defense information systems and national security systems and how we provide needed intelligence to support US policy makers and the US military. It would have been really nice to have materials that were about the NSA mission. It was a great opportunity to reach people about NSA directly from us. As I think about this, the other common question was what is OPSEC. This was probably because there were posters on our table with the IOSS Purple Dragon and saying Think OPSEC. Anyway, OPSEC is operational security. It the concept reducing the harm that can come to you from others by looking at the clues that tip someone about you. For example, if you were traveling, a pile of newspapers at the door, would be a clue that you were not home and this would be a good house to rob. During the day, we met lots of kids and talk about NSA. Its was a good experience. Also, unlike Monday, there wasn't a huge wave of people, but more constant stream. The only wave we had was on the RD logo. At the end we packed up the booth and moved it to our cars.
We had a few minets to chill before the next part of the day. We sat at the Intel Quad while we waied for a reception for the presenting judges. I got to meet the NASA presenters, two of which were astronauts. That was very nice. One snack was a mash potato bar where you would put mash potatoes in a martini glass and add toppings. This must be the new "in" thing because a week later I would have the same thing at the IEEE Security and Privacy Poster Session. Was it good? Yes it was. At the appropriate time, we assembled and went down via a side way to the main floor and into the main hall that was used for the opening ceremony. It was reused for the special award ceremony and grand prize ceremony on friday. The special award judges sat on far left side in alphabetical order of organization. This meant we were pretty far back. There are whole lot of organization that begin with "A" such as in American .... We were also further back because Security is far behind many of the "National" organizations. The way the ceremony worked. the MC annouced who the presenter was and for what organization. For us it was, Stephen Katz of NSA Research Directorate. The MC was another weatherperson from the local area, different channel. The organization's logo was on the screen above. Then a recording would annouce the winners. Second award from location in subcategory, name (and name if applicable), repeate for all awards. The winners would walk up to the stage, shake hands, and stand in a line, when all were assembled. A quick picture, and a recorded message (limited to 250 characters) stated what the award was for. Exit stage Right.
Backstage, or in the hall way outside the main room, was another platform, where the presenter and the winners would assemble for their group photos. and then done. This was an assembly line to get through all the special award organizations in about 2.5 hours. 7:30pm to 10pm.
After the photo, I congraduated the winners, Stephen presented them with their award certificate and a NSA pen with lightup logo. And the night was done.
A photo of the stage as we waited for the special awards ceremony to begin.
Thursday: 9876 Steps, 4.83 miles
Last Day, Friday, I wasn't expecting much, but it still has lots going on. The main event for the day is the presentation of the grand prizes. These are the science fair awards rather than the special awards from the night before. The MC for this morning, was another weatherperson from the local Pittsburgh Stations, They successfully covered all three major networks, KDKA, WPXI, WTAE. It began with a short introduction from the president of SSP and a video of highlights from the past week. Then it was into awards. There were awards for 4th place, 3rd, place, with lots of students winning awards. They were divided into two groups, biological sciences and material sciences. Sarayu Caulfield and Alexandra Ulmer, who won our honorable mention award, received a 4th place for their project. With each name called out, there was a group picture, and students moved off stage. The 1st and 2nd place winners were all called together. Also, each of these students received an asteroid named after them, thanks to MIT Lincoln Labs. There were two winning projects for 1st place. Elliot Gorokhovsky, the winner of the NSA award, won 1st place in software. Also of note the other 1st place winner in software also had a cybersecurity component, Charles Noyes, 16, of Villa Park, California for his project BitAV: Fast Anti-Malware by Distributed Blockchain Consensus and Feedforward Scanning. Charles also won best in category. Prizes were: $500 for 4th, $1000 for 3rd, $1500 for 2nd, $3,000 for 1st, and $5000 for best in category.
After the best in category prices were announced, there were a set of awards that were pretty big, such as trips to London, China, India, and even a tours of CERN and JPL. Someday, maybe we'll have an award with a tour. Then there were the three top prizes. The Intel Young Scientist, $50,000 for Low-Cost Disposable Device for Point-of-Care Nucleic Acid Testing of HIV: Sample-to-Answer in 60 Minutes for Less than $5.00 and International Oil Spill Remediation: The Numerical Simulation of an in-situ Subsea Separator, Part II. And the last top prize, The Gordon E. Moore Award, of $75,000 for Aircraft Cabin Airflow: Curbing Disease Transmission. And then confetti was blown around and it was over.
at the grand prize award ceremony. Just about 45min early.
The top 3 winners getting their award.
Make it back to Maryland after a great trip to ISEF. I'll continue to update this thread to fill in the missing information, but timesheet is in for the week so that's all for now.
When I returned, I found that the chewable vitamins in my suitcase had melted and harded in the shape of the bottle. It wasn't that warm but warm enough |
The melta vitamins were nice and translucent. It looked pretty with a light behind. |
Adam
I made an annoucement on the night of the awards ceremony.
See it here: http://cps-vo.org/node/20441
Adam
The Society for Science and the Public has a flickr account with pictures from ISEF 2015.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/societyforscience
They also have a special NSA RD photo album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/societyforscience/sets/72157650079761903
I believe I'm done with writing about the ISEF 2015
BTW Link to our award page. https://student.societyforscience.org/nsa-research-directorate
Made it to Pittsburgh. Checked in and at the iad booth. A few students have come by. The board behind me has all 1700 finalist names.