About
Science of Security first sponsored an award at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in 2015. The award was created to encourage school students to pursue scientific research in cybersecurity and related fields. The award is open to high school students who are competition in the ISEF Finals. Students from all over the world, usually 70-80 countries are represented in the finals. In 2017, a new award was added to recognize outstanding mathematics contributions. In 2018, NSA Cybersecurity joined NSA Research to recognize outstanding material science contributions.
Looking to do a science fair project in cybersecurity? Visit the VO Page on getting started.
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ISEF 2024
Held in Los Angeles, CA May 11-17, 2024 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. NSA Research judged projects for awards in Cybersecurity, Principals of Security and Privacy, Mathematics, and Material Science.
* Denote Grand Award Winners and + ISEF Top Award Winners.
Mathematics
- Anay Aggarwal and Manu Isaacs of Portland, OR – 1st Place - $2,500 - MATH030T - An Elementary Method for Fast Modular Exponentiation With Factored Modulus*
- Joseph Amichai Vulakh of Lexington, KY – 2nd Place - $1,500 - MATH014 — Twisted Homogeneous Racks Over the Alternating Groups*
- Arav Chand, Dix Hills, NY – 3rd Place - $1,000 - MATH016 — Fibonacci Analogues of Legendre’s Formula and Fine’s Theorem
Cybersecurity
- Ayushi Mehrotra of Irvine, CA - 1st Place – $3,000 - ROBO057 — AdvMed: Detecting Adversarial Attacks in Medical Deep Learning Systems
- Eric Ruike Song of Yorktown Heights, NY - 2nd Place - $1,500 - SOFT033 — Improving the Ransomware Detection/Mitigation Proof-of-Concept With Machine Learning*
- Diego Zhen-Yi Frias of Portland, OR - 2nd Place - $1,500 - SOFT024 — Engineering a WebAssembly-Based Shell
- Aidan Ong and Junxiang Cai of Singapore - 3rd Place – $500 - ROBO019T - State Space Models Are All You Need*
- Sebastian Rae Alexis of Irvine, CA - 3rd Place – $500 - SOFT036 — Unmasking Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities in Direct and Transitive OSS Dependencies
- Jun Jang of Oxford, MS - 3rd Place – $500 - SOFT040 — A Novel Approach to Detecting Academic Dishonesty Involving Artificial Intelligence
- Pratishrut Kamal of Raleigh, NC and Varshith Vadlamudi of Apex, NC - 3rd Place – $500 - SOFT046T — DynaGrad: A Novel Gradient Descent With Adaptive Dual Learning Rates & Momenta for Improved Optimization and Accelerated Convergence in Deep Neural Networks*
Principles of Security and Privacy
- Michelle Wei of Saratoga, CA - 1st Place - $3,000 - SOFT044 — Solving Second-Order Cone Programs in Matrix Multiplication Time*
- Jonathan Luke Dorminy of McDonough, GA – 2nd Place – $1,500 - EBED003 — Terahertz Gap Communication Using Black Body Radiation
- Sierra Anne Sun of Sandy, UT - 3rd Place - $500 - BEHA015 — Differential Empathy, Social Dominance Orientation, and the Limitations of Social Science Research*
Material Science
- Grace Yuan of Spring, TX and Nikita Catherine D’Souza of The Woodlands, TX – 1st Place - $1,000 - MATS030T — Engineering a Greener Future: A Novel, Biodegradable, Self-Powered, Chitosan-Based Food Packaging Material
ISEF 2023
Held in Dallas, TX May 13-19, 2023 at the Dallas convention center. NSA Research judged projects for awards in Cybersecurity, Principals of Security and Privacy, Mathematics, and Material Science.
* Denote Grand Award Winners and + ISEF Top Award Winners.
Mathematics
- Rich Wang of Sugar Land, TX – 1st Place - $2,500 - MATH011 - Special Chip-Firing Algorithm Ending States *
- Jeffrey Xu of Skillman, NJ – 2nd Place - $1,500 - MATH034 - Extending the Vieta-Newton Theorem
- Aaron Kim of Flushing, NY – 3rd Place - $1,000 - MATH040 - Integer Parts of Powers Which Are Always Composite
Cybersecurity
- Landon Colaresi of Pittsburgh, PA, - 1st Place – $3,000 - SOFT038 - Finding JS Vulnerabilities With Concolic Execution *
- Aditya Dewan of Mississauga, Ontario Canada – 2nd Place – $1,500 - ROBO041 - SPRKD: Effective Knowledge Distillation *
- Jagadeepram Maddipatla of Ashburn, VA – 2nd Place - $1,500 - EBED026 - Light Speed Linear Algebra Accelerator
- Gabriela Martinez Disla of San Juan, PR – 3rd Place – $500 - SOFT039 - Videogame That Helps Diagnose Abuse in Minors
- Alexis Li of Gilbert, AZ - 3rd Place – $500 - ROBO059 - Modeling Brain Network Dynamics With BrainSTEAM
- Landon Flemming of Albuquerque, NM – 3rd Place – $500 - EBED034 - CubeSat Fault Management System
- Grant Wang of East Amherst, NY – 3rd Place – $500 - BEHA020 - Multilingual Offensive Language Detection *
Principles of Security and Privacy
- Siddhu Pachipala of The Woodlands, TX - 1st Place - $3,000 - BEHA041 - DSM Diagnosis Is Dead
- Agastya Sridharan of San Diego, CA – 2nd Place – $1,500 - CBIO029 - Bio-Inspired Models Improve Small Data Performance *
- Harshil Avlani of Chandler, AZ – 3rd Place - $500 - SOFT045 - Analyzing the Effect of MCM on Spectator Qubits *
Material Science
- Nikki Taleghani of Kirkland, WA – 1st Place - $1,000 - MATS027 - Carbon Dot and Cyanoacrylate Fuming Method
ISEF 2022
The Research Awards returned to a hybrid ISEF in 2022. NSA Research judged projects for awards in Cybersecurity, Principals of Security and Privacy (previously the Science of Security), Mathematics, and Material Science.
* Denote Grand Award Winners and + ISEF Top Award Winners.
Mathematics
- Morgan Holien of Superior, CO – 1st Place - $1,500 - MATH017 - Tetration of Non-Integer Heights
- Donald Liveoak of Allen Park, MI – 2nd Place - $1,000 - MATH032 - Schrodinger Bridges on Discrete Domains*
- Meryl Zhang of Plano, TX – 3rd Place - $700 - MATH002 - Efficient Hybrid Matrix Multiplication Algorithm
Cybersecurity
- Landon Colaresi of Pittsburgh, PA – 1st Place - $3,000 SOFT032 - Malware Detection With Graph Convolution Networks *+
- Joshua Shunk of Gilbert, AZ - 2nd Place - $1,500 - ROBO076 - Neuron-Specific Dropout Regularization
- Luke Bousfield and James Liu of Boise, ID – 2nd Place - $1,500 - SOFT026T - Searching for SVP Solutions
- Andy Phung of San Jose, CA – 3rd Place - $500 - ROBO059 - Adversarial Example Defense From Origin Hypothesis *
- Catherine Kung of Vestavia, AL – 3rd Place - $500 - ROBO034 - Machine Recognition of American Sign Language
- Anisha Musti of Scarsdale, NY – 3rd Place - $500 - PHYS050 - Quantum Teleportation on Novel Qubits
- Peter Radic of San Diego, CA – 3rd Place - $500 - EBED042 - Wireless Geolocation
Principles of Security and Privacy
- Harshal Bharatia of Plano, TX – 1st Place - $3,000 - ROBO003 - Adaptive Learning: Evolve Explainable Predictions
- Arvind Seshan of Pittsburgh, PA – 2nd Place - $1,500 - SOFT039 - Machine Learning To Augment Dynamic Time Warping
- Yavuz Yurduseven of Amasya, Turkey – 3rd Place - $500 - MATH009 - New Approaches to Broken Pick-Up Sticks Problem *
Material Science
- Kaitlyn Zuravel and Lauren Zuravel of Fayetteville, NC – 1st Place - $1,000 - ENEV088T - Rapid Degrading Bioplastics for Single-Use Items
ISEF 2021
The Research Awards at ISEF '21 were not awarded due to ISEF 21 being a virtual event.
ISEF 2020
Due to ISEF 2020 being canceled for coronavirus, there was no NSA awards for ISEF 2020.
ISEF 2019
NSA Annoucement | SoS VO Article
At ISEF 2019, the NSA Research Directorate judged projects for awards in Science of Security and Privacy, Mathematics, Material Science and Cyber Pioneers.
Handouts from the NSA Research Directorate Booth are here.
Science of Security
- Suha Hussain of Ozone Park NY - 1st Place - $3,000 Prize (Abstract)
- Alice Guo of Morgantown, WV - 2nd Place - $1,000 Prize (Abstract)
- Divya Amirtharaj of Beaverton, OR - 2nd Place - $1,000 Prize (Abstract)
- Gabrielle Liu of Nashville, TN - 2nd Place - $1,000 Prize (Abstract)
- Michael Brockman of Bartlesville, OK - Honorable Mention (Abstract)
- Adam Kelly of Dubin Ireland - Honorable Mention (Abstract)
- Advay Koranne of West Linn, OR - Honorable Mention (Abstract)
Cyber Pioneer
- Kevin Meng of Plano, TX - 1st Place - $1,000 (Abstract)
- Milidu Jayaweera of Albuquerque, NM - 2nd Place - $1,000 (Abstract)
- Ryan McDowell of Annapolis, MD - Honorable Mention (Abstract)
Material Science
- Kaitlyn Zuravel of Fayetteville, NC - 1st Place - $1,000 (Abstract)
- Jacqueline Prawira of Mountain House, CA - Honorable Mention (Abstract)
Mathematics
- Daniel Santiago of Anasco, PR - 1st Place - $1,500 (Abstract)
- John Piwinski of San Antonio, TX - 2nd Place - $750 (Abstract)
- AnaMaria Perez of Albuquerque, NM - 2nd Place - $750 (Abstract)
- Aayush Karan of Muskego, WI - Honorable Mention (Abstract)
- Breandon Matusch of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada - Honorable Mention (Abstract)
ISEF 2018
NSA Announcement | SoS VO Article | YouTube Video (Video Starts at 1:01:40)
ISEF 2018, in Pittsburgh, PA. Held May 13 - 18, 2018 in the convention center.
23 Students were recognized with 20 awards. Two projects were team projects. The award categories were: Science of Security, Mathematics, Material Science, Future of Computing, Physical Sciences, and Cyber Pioneer.
Science of Security
- Vivek Bhupatiraju of Lexington MA - 1st Place - $3,000 Prize
- Deepti Vaidyanathan of Baton Rouge, LA - 2nd Place - $1,000 Prize
- Suha Hussain of Ozone Park, NY - 2nd Place - $1,000 Prize
- Divya Amirtharaj of Portland, OR - 2nd Place - $1,000 Prize (Abstract)
- Nicole Meister of Ellicott City, MD - Honorable Mention
- Daniel Santiago of Anasco, Puerto Rico - Honorable Mention
- Shrya Pingali of Salt Lake City, UT - Honorable Mention
Mathematics
- Bryan Gopal of Chandler, AZ - 1st Place - $1,500
- Franklyn Wang of Falls Church, VA - 2nd Place - $750 Prize
- Jim Kong of Owings MD, William Longsworth, and Nathan Hayes of Dunkirk MD - $750 Prize
- Isha Puri of Chappaqua, NY - Honorable Mention
- Emil Geisler of Bountiful, UT - Honorable Mention
Material Science
- Kevin Meng of Plano, TX - 1st Place - $1,000 Prize
- Jacob Wu of Princeton, NJ - Honorable Mention
Cyber Pioneer
- Eshan Chhabra of Plano, TX - 1st Place - $1,000 Prize
- Aditya Singh of Ponte Vedra, FL - Honorable Mention
Physical Science
- Sharmi Shah of Colonia, NJ - 1st Place - $1,000 Prize
- Carissa Wu of Potomac, MD and Abhishek Allamsetty of Herndon, VA - Honorable Mention
Future of Computing
- Swagat Bhattacharyya of Morgantown, WV - 1st Place - $1,000 Prize
- Cade Brown of Knoxville, TN - Honorable Mention
ISEF 2017
NSA Announcement | SoS VO Article | YouTube Video (Video Starts at 1:24:04)
ISEF 2017, in Los Angeles, California. Held May 14 - 19, 2017 in the convention center.
1st Place in Science of Security - $3,000
- Rucha Joshi from Westwood High School, Austin, TX for Power-efficient, Delay and Spatial Error Tolerant, Dynamic 3D Network Analysis
2nd Place in Science of Security - $1,000
- Holly Jackson from Notre Dame High School, San Jose, CA for Unlocking History: An Algorithm to Virtually Unfold 3D Computed Tomography Scans of Unopened Historical Documents
- Mihir Patel & Nikhil Sardana from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA for Automating Identification of Terrorist Recruitment on Social Media Platforms
Honorable Mentions in Science of Security
- Nicky Wojtania from Plano West Senior High School, Plano, TX for Cellulose Nanocrystals for Security Applications: Embedding Non-Optical Signatures Provided by Nanoparticles into Cellulose Nanocrystal Chiral Nematic Films
- Mary Catherine Lorio from St. Joseph's Academy, Baton Rouge, LA for Quantum Eraser with Applications to Optical Quantum Information Processing of Polarization-Encoded Qubits
- Michael Litt from Orange High School, Pepper Pike, OH for MATCHLESS: A Linear Algebraic Approach to Duplicate File Identification
1st Place in Mathematics - $1,000
- Shobhita Sundaram from Greenwich High School, Greenwich, CT for Detection of Premalignant Pancreatic Cancer via Computational Analysis of Serum Proteomic Profiles
Honorable Mentions in Mathematics
- Carson Cato from Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts, Hot Springs, AR for Optimizing the Search for Mersenne Primes
- Tassilo Schwarz from Johannes-Heidenhain-Gymnasium Traunreut, Traunreut, Bayern Germany for Done Defense System: Detection, Tracking, Classification and Targeting of Flight Objects in 3D and Real Time
ISEF 2016
NSA Announcement | SoS VO Article
ISEF 2016, in Phoenix, Arizona. The theme was Think Beyond.
1st Place - $3,000
- Charles Noyes from Villa Park, California for Efficient Blockchain-Driven Multiparty Computation Markets at Scale
2nd Place - $1,000
- Karthik Yegnesh from Lansdale, Pennsylvania for Cosheaf Theoretical Constructions in Networks and Persistent Homology
- Rucha Joshi from Austin, Texas for Determining Network Robustness Using Region Based Connectivity
ISEF 2015
NSA Announcement | SoS VO Article | SSP Page
First year with sponsoring the award. Location was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the theme was The Future is Bright.
1st Place - $3,000
- Elliot Gorokhovsky from Boulder, Colorado for A Novel Algorithm for #SAT Using the Inclusion-Exclusion Principle and Memorization
2nd Place - $1,000
- Sarayu Caulfield and Alexandra Ulmer from Portland, Oregon for Capacity Limits of Working Memory: The Impact of Multitasking on Cognitive Control in Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants
- Cherry Ying Zou from Poolesville, Maryland for Development of an Authorship Identification Algorithm for Twitter Using Stylometric Techniques