Jun Park, Evan Liang and Zara Farooq are heading to Los Angeles soon to compete in an international science fair.
The three Rider students will be presenting their project about pancreatic cancer at Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair on May 11-17.
Science teacher Trevor Wildman said the three students worked hard on the project.
Park said the project is a machine-learning model in code that can recognize specific patterns in CT scans for pancreatic cancer. That way it can determine whether or not a person is likely to have the disease.
“We want to make our model more efficient, more accurate, like possibly even integrate it into a hospital setting,” Liang said. “Or it can be used in the real world.”
The kids didn’t have any past experience with competitions until in late March when they went to Texas A&M for the Texas Science and Engineering Fair.
“We let some other professors look at our project and gave us some great feedback on it,” Liang said. “But building the project and everything like that came first.”
Park hasn’t done any competition like this before, but he has competed in UIL academics before so he has confidence that he is able to provide the most help and support in this project.
“I could definitely come up with more thorough answers to questions and just research more into pancreatic cancer that we’ve been studying,¨ Park said
Park said that humans can take a long time to determine if you have pancreatic cancer or not. Instead a daily AI bot can be used to see if you have signs or chances of having this.
Farooq has been working on her own trying to get more accurate data and just new techniques that they can implement for their project. She said she can work on her public speaking skills because she’s one of her team’s main speakers for the project.
“So everyone on my team is honestly an amazing public speaker, and I’m really bad at answering questions comprehensively,” Farooq said. “So that’s the only thing I need to work on, but everyone on my team, I think they’re perfect.”
Wildman couldn’t have been prouder of his kids and their hard dedication to the program. However, they do have some improvements to be made on their projects after hearing what the judges had to say at the Texas Science and Engineering Fair.
“I think they showed excellent dedication to the project and worked together as a team quite well,” Wildman said. “They did an excellent job.”
