Page 57 - Summer 2006

Winners of the ASA awards granted at the 2006 International Science and Engineering Fair with ASA judge Elliott H. Berger (l to r) Elliott, Jonathan Blake Snellon, Courtney Anne Rafes, Caroline Elizabeth Pietsch, and Joseph Anthony Crivello.
from the American Association for Artificial Intelli- gence.
The other Honorable Mention Award was given to Courtney Anne Rafes, from Northwest High School, Justin, TX, for a project entitled, “Tracking the Sound: A Second Year Study on an Ultrasonic Train Wreck Avoidance System.” This innovative proj- ect has already had a patent filed and has raised interest by the railroad industry. She conceived of the idea to acoustically detect problems with track joints or oncoming trains using ultrasound at
163 kHz. She purchased much of her equipment online through eBay. Ms. Rafes project was also selected for a sec- ond place Grand Award by Intel of $1,500. She was also the recipient of an ASA Honorable Mention Award at the 2005 ISEF.
The ASA judges were lead by Dr. Diane Kewley-Port, from the Indiana University Speech and Hearing Sciences Department, and team members Dr. Robert Port, from both the Linguistics and Cognitive Science Departments at Indiana University, and Mr. Elliott Berger, Senior Scientist in Auditory Research at E- A-R / Aearo Technologies in Indianapolis, IN. Initially 45 projects were selected that were related to acoustics and the judges found it challenging to narrow the field to only four projects for awards. The judging team was amazed by the understanding of acoustics and other scientific areas by these high school students. Moreover their enthusiasm for the projects and their presentation were extremely impressive. In our opinion the coming generation of scientists and engineers will be up to the challenges that lie before them.
D. Kewley-Port, Ph.D.
for example. In her final training and testing of the 240 utterances, an accura- cy rate of 45% was achieved. Ms. Pietsch compared this performance to human listeners who were only about 10% more accurate than her algorithmic approach. This research was both innovative and thorough in its approach to the very dif- ficult problem of recognizing emotions. Ms. Pietsch’s research was also recog- nized by a second place Grand Award from Intel that awarded her $1,500 in the Computer Science category, by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence that awarded her $500, and the American Psychological Association that selected the project for Honorable Mention. Hopefully we will see Ms. Pietsch at an ASA meeting in the near future.
Three Honorable Mention awards were presented by ASA. They were all of the highest quality and interestingly from very different areas. One award was made to Jonathan Blake Sellon from Staples High School, Westport, CT whose research was entitled, “Modeling Auditory Attention by Implementing IHC Movement into Frequency Selectivity of the Inner Ear: A Novel Approach to Stimuli Separation.” This
was an ambitious project that began with the Meddis cochlear auditory nerve model and was extended by Mr. Sellon’s own research involving movement of the inner hair cell cilia. His research was also selected for a Grand Award of $1500 by Merck Research Laboratories, by the American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association for their $500 second place, by the American Physiological Society for their $1000 first place, and by the Ashtavadhani Vidwan Ambati Subbaraya Chetty (AVASC) Foundation for their $500 second place.
Two Honorable Mention Awards were given in the engineering category. One was to Joseph Anthony Crivello from University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI for his project entitled, “Acoustic Localization, Detection, and Identification: A System for More Effectively Utilizing Sound as a Tool.” This was an interesting project that used small, inexpensive wireless sensors dropped over an area to localize sound sources and identify them from a library of pre-analyzed sounds. The sensors incorporated global positioning system nodes for accurate location. Other awards given Mr. Crivello include a third place Grand Award from Intel of $1000 and $500
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