They haven't finished high school yet and they are already scientists

At the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, this week young scientists competitions are held, in which teenagers aged 17-18 will compete who have developed systems that are hard to believe were developed by children. First cluster

The Young Scientists and Developers Competition in Israel 2008, initiated and held by the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, under the auspices of Intel, was held this week (19/3/2008-17). For the winners and participants of the "Young Scientists and Developers in Israel" competition, new and diverse possibilities and opportunities open up following the competition: scholarships for higher studies, representing Israel in international competitions organized by Intel worldwide, participation in research camps abroad and meetings with first-class scientific and industrial people. The competitors in the global competition, who come from more than 40 countries around the world, compete in groundbreaking fields in science and technology for prizes, scholarships, grants and scientific equipment worth 3.5 million dollars.

The participants are between the ages of 7-18 with curiosity and research ability, knowledge and motivation at the highest level in the State of Israel, who faithfully represent the face of Israeli society: new immigrants, Arab youth, kibbutzniks, secular and religious. All of them excel in mental creativity and high and original performance levels, in a wide variety of fields: life sciences (biology, bioinformatics), social sciences, humanities (history, literature and language), natural and environmental sciences (physics and chemistry), robotics and computer science. On the face of it, it seems that the youth are not sure that the state/society is doing enough to ensure the security and well-being of the individual and this is reflected in the various research topics that the young scientists have chosen to examine and investigate, from which it appears as if they are seeking to rescue various fields, scientific and social. In addition, a trend of scientific developments that aim to help populations with physical disabilities is particularly noticeable this year. Among the studies participating in this year's competition, you can also find quite a few projects in the field of computing.

Inbal Fleischer, Alon Gelber and Roi Shahar, from Sharet High School in Netanya, developed a computerized system for diagnosing pressure ulcers and proposing ways to treat the phenomenon. A pressure sore is an area of ​​skin damage that occurs when soft tissue is pressed between bone and a hard external surface, for an extended period of time. The difficulty that exists today in choosing the most effective treatment for the phenomenon lies in the fact that in order to correctly identify a pressure ulcer, one must undergo a specialization, since it is a complex wound with different levels of severity. The purpose of the system developed by the students' teamwork is to identify and diagnose the degree of the wound by producing and processing a three-dimensional image. The data received is fed into the system which processes them and offers the most effective treatment for healing the wound. The unique system facilitates the diagnosis, shortens the processes of identifying the wound and treating it and applies an innovative method for calculating depth, which is based on mathematical processing of images produced by two cameras. The main advantage of the system is that it is non-invasive and painful, in contrast to manual measurements that are currently carried out by nurses.
Intermediate: Web cam for skin cancer detection

Yechiel Reder from Hadera and Yogev Orenstein from Moshav Umatz, who study at the "Maayan Shahar" Educational Kiryat in Kibbutz Horesh, developed a computerized system for identifying dangerous moles and tracking melanoma moles. Melanoma, the malignant skin cancer, is less common than other types of tumors, but extremely dangerous. Every year, about 1200 melanoma patients are diagnosed in Israel, of which an average of about 200 patients are expected to die, due to late detection or poor diagnosis of the disease. In a research that has a mission and a line, the young scientists propose to perfect the existing test, which is exposed to errors and human errors, in the development based on a computerized system with a higher level of accuracy.

The system is based on a simple web camera, which photographs the mole and performs an analysis of the image according to the four-game method: size, shade, geometry and boundaries. If the data processing indicates a high probability of identifying a suspicious mole, the system will issue an alert. In addition, the system will continuously monitor the tests performed by the user, using a medical database in which the data of the tests will be stored, in order to compare them with the data of previous tests. The young scientists estimate that: "The project is a significant advance in the field of detecting and identifying cancerous moles, and can serve as a cornerstone for the development of more complex systems that will diagnose additional skin lesions."

Daniel and Raphael Angel from the Torah and Meda High School in Jerusalem, developed a solution for people with visual disabilities that helps them overcome their difficulties - "picture in sound". The development is based on the creation of a visual map of a certain area by sounds, so that a person with visual impairment, even a complete one, can identify obstacles and orient himself in the space. The innovation inherent in the work is in the conversion of a map / image into a matrix of sounds, in which each pixel is translated into a specific sound: the device detects an area with the help of an infrared sensor, converts it into a virtual image and presents the image with sounds. In addition, Daniel and Raphael developed software that allows the creation of maps/images that will be converted to sounds manually, which also incorporates a learning environment for the blind to understand the meaning of the sounds and to practice the method, so that he can "listen to the image" and understand quickly.

Itai Yahlom, who lives in Carmi Yosef and studies at the Ala Science High School in Lod, developed the Open-mind project - an attempt to give a computer the ability to learn and understand human beings. Open-mind is an intelligence capable of learning, by storing symbols in memory, from a variety of topics in mathematics to identifying objects in pictures. The system that I developed is a platform that enables rapid learning of the software, without the need for the human component, since it is capable of extracting educational information independently from text segments or movies. In addition, the learning ability of the software can be stopped at any stage, a feature that allows you to create a wide variety of software, without them continuing to grow. The learning base of the software is based on chaos theory and the philosophical question "What came before what - the egg or the chicken?" And it uses an evolutionary algorithm based on a trial and error method. According to Yahlom: "The uses for the learning software are many and varied and offer significant progress to society and science in the various fields - from search engines with the ability to understand to artificial intelligence that will hack into other computers for security purposes."

Fidaa Asli from Kfar Kara together with Noor Mahamid and Nasreen Riad Mahamid from Umm Al Fahm, students of Atid High School in Umm Al Fahm, developed a computerized system for controlling clean rooms in hospitals. The young scientists investigated the alarming phenomenon of patients who are hospitalized and are exposed to the risk of contracting infections and diseases due to resistant bacteria that multiply in hospitals - a danger that is faced by all hospitalized patients, but especially those with weakened immune systems that cannot overcome these infections. In numerical terms, this is a phenomenon on a large scale: according to According to the World Health Organization survey from 2006, in 55 medical centers in the world, at any given moment, over 1.4 million people suffer from infections they contracted during hospitalization in hospitals. In less developed countries the infection rate is two to ten times higher. In Israel, infections cause the death of approximately 4000 to 5000 hospitalized patients every year.
As part of the research, FIDA, Noor and Nasreen Riad carried out experiments and reviews of isolation rooms (clean rooms) in the pediatric intensive care department at Tel Hashomer Hospital and designed a computerized control system whose role is to keep the air as clean as possible in the rooms and to prevent the exit of polluted air from the patient rooms to the other departments of the hospital. The system is based on detecting the amount of infections in the isolation rooms and changing the air according to the amount of findings.

To be continued - tomorrow.