Several Arizona high school students were recently given the Future Innovators award during the Governor’s Celebration of Innovation. Learn about the research being done by these teens.
Ted Simons: The governors' celebration of innovation is an annual event that honors Arizona's current and future leaders in technology and innovation. At the most recent awards ceremony four young innovativers were honored. Here's a look at their research.
Kurt Andres: There was report run on turbines and their efficiency, so I decided to look for mass and balance, and to maximize efficiency, which is important in Arizona with our upcoming energy efficiency and also global as we look to maximize energy efficiency through turbines. I built an instrument package that used a data model and dynamically measured math and balance, and I use add ceiling fan as a test model. I was able to use the law of cosign and matrix to solve for the angle. This would be very important for wind turbines in promoting rotor damage and maximizing be efficiency of a turbine. If you can eliminate mass, you can prevent damage excessive noise, all kinds of problems that result from the imbalance in a turbine. Mine innovation allows to you Mount two fixture screws a very small package that use as data logger and an accelerometer and records a memory card, the angle of the current at which the imbalance occurs. My project is very compact and very easily Mountable, and is a different approach because it uses two simple equations so solve for angle of a current and you can use up to -- multiple blades to fix the mass in balance and you than disperse the weight you need to shave or add to the turbine to dynamically balance the turbine.
Scott Olson: The purpose of my innovation was the Development of an original design for a fiber optic base display. My initial motivation was the desire to create a textile basis light system. Textile in the sense it was flexible, durable and efficient in its operation so it could be woven into a shirt or have a lot of the attributes a typical textile has. The goals revolved around efficiency, flexibility, durability, cost of production, and an enhanced viewing angle in the textile display. After performing multiple tests, which included measurements, evaluations, I came upon the conclusion that the displaced -- which I had created produced an enhanced viewing angle, more flexibility than displays we have today and a more durable system as well. Some of the end uses currently would be within large-scale display systems, which could possibly be flexible or solid state. One exciting aspect is that it could potentially be used in 3D police play systems where an object can be viewed at all angles by an observer walking around cylinder itself. I'm still conditioning research on my project and I'm planning to become involved with the Stephens Institute of Innovation in order to develop the project into a future business plan and future product.
Stan Palasek: I found that a HEXUS is metabolized at a speed that's related to how much energy it would make for an ISO. So from this I was able to get a certain mathematical equation which gave a lot of new insight about how the sugars are metabolized. I looked at the sugars and found that the rates they're metabolized is proportional to how much energy they would need for the cell. So this could be modeled by what's called differential equations. And solutions to this equation look like these simple curves, so this would show with respect to time how much of the molecule into the cell. I found that the amount that's metabolized is equal to some constant times the rate of transport. With this new information we can now synthesize a new type of Hexus that would give us more energy with less of the actual sugar. And this could be implemented for not only everyday nutrition, but also for metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity. Using my research and applying it to some field of science and get to be do a lot of math, which is what I think is really cool.
Varun Ramesh: I decided to pick a topic, the topic of hand gesture recognition, and I create add simple recognition system that I could experiment with and play around with in order to see what could be done to make it faster and more intuitive. My technique uses at vision-based technique. And basically I'm using an image from the camera, it tries to extract information about the hand from it. After extracting the hand, which is extracted using a profile that has to be generated after user's skin color, it use as founding box to detect the state of the hand and from there it uses the motion of the hand to find gestures and do tracking to control stuff like cursors and things such as that. I actually had a demo in which could you use the gesture to signify clicks and unclicks on a mouse. From that a user was able to move windows and play simple games on a computer using only their hand. Would you have to learn this button does this, this one does that, you kind of have to do combinations. That's confusing for most people, but with something such as a connect all you do is just replicate the motion your character would do and make it easier for anyone to come up, they don't need to learn what your control is. If a true recognition system could be implemented, that everyday users could be using it could be incredibly beneficial for everyday computer users. For example in the movie slide demos, someone could select an item from a list or any sort of queue, in the map demo somebody could navigate Google maps or yahoo maps by moving their hand possibly rotating it zooming in. And even in the drawing demo, artists could have new content creation tools that have new ways of interfacing and allowing the create objects more intuitively.
