It’s Science!
‘Best Paper Award’ goes to FHS group at prestigious competition
The team consisted of Langalibalele Lunga, Vivaan Singhvi, Varrun Prakash, Pragya Nidhi and Chris Keum.
“It felt really gratifying to see all the hard work I put in get materialized in the publication,” Singhvi said. “I gained a lot of valuable research experience, especially in the computer science field.
“I’ve also gotten really familiar with image processing with computers and implementing machine learning models to accelerate any task at hand,” he added. “The presentation I gave to the conference was an amazing opportunity, as getting to speak in front of dozens of people really helped me develop presentational skills and was overall a great experience.
“For me, this publication is like the ‘reward’ for all our effort, and the first step in our journey toward our careers in computer science and artificial intelligence.”
“It felt empowering to have our work published,” Lunga said. “It gave us all a sense of motivation in our future research and showed us that we can contribute to the scientific community despite being high school students.
“I’ve learned how to construct and implement a research-based solution,” he added. “I’ve also learned more on the impact machine learning can have in biology/botany, as our project created a solution to the tedious task of identifying plants by hand.
“The presentation I did during our poster display taught
me how to articulate scientific ideas to other scientists,” Lunga added.
“Amazing,” Prakash said about the experience. “We all learned a lot and it was nice to see it get published.
“This experience helped me see the growing effect of AI and has inspired me to potentially pursue a career in the field,” he added.
“The SMC is a research competition against undergraduate students, graduate students and ORNL scientists to draft a research paper and give a lightning talk plus poster presentation,” Lunga said. “The research paper, titled ‘High-Throughput Phenotyping using Computer Vision and Machine Learning,’ is one product of multiple from our summer internship at ORNL.”
“Out of 36 paper submissions to the conference, only six were selected for publication, including ours,” he added.
“Additionally, our team competed in the Early Career category against undergraduates, where we won the Best Paper Award.”
“It was an honor to represent Farragut,” Lunga said, crediting the guidance the team received from their mentor, Dr. Ty Frazier of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
