November 10, 2024
Today was the final round of the S. -T. Yau High School Science Award (Asia). I gave an oral defense about novel research on mission planning algorithms for using active debris removal to mitigate the Kessler syndrome. For those interested in the technical details, you can read my full research report!
The judges announced that I have won the 2024 Harry Shum High School Computer Science Gold Award and will represent the Asia region in the world finals at Tsinghua University, Beijing this December! My research project was the only project to be selected this year for Computer Science in Asia. See you in Beijing!
December 7, 2024
Today is the first day of the award event. I’m quite nervous — I will soon present my research to a panel of renowned computer science researchers from around the world, in the form of a 15-minute oral presentation and 15-minute Q&A.
In the preparation room, I’ve met up with my research mentor to discuss last-minute preparations and presentation skills — he happened to be attending a conference in Beijing at the time, and I’m extremely grateful to receive his support in person! Some of the other students seem to have very elaborate presentations. One even brought in a massive demo of what seemed to be a random walk, perhaps for a physics or economics presentation
I’ve completed my presentation now. I’m having mixed feelings about it; while I think overall my presentation went quite well, I also feel like I could have slowed down a bit to try and explain more clearly.
I was also asked some questions that I didn’t have direct answers to — mainly because these topics were slightly beyond the scope of my research. Although I managed to address them, I’m not fully satisfied with my response. I think this might be intentional — perhaps they want to know more about how my research fits into the wider field of space debris removal and metaheuristic optimization.
After the presentation, I decided to take a short walk around the Tsinghua campus with my parents. For a research institution of its caliber, I honestly found the campus to look pretty normal. One of the streets we walked down (presumably a residential area) didn’t look any different to an average street in Beijing! We also passed some engineering buildings along the way.
Still, the campus had an enjoyable quiet atmosphere and most of the research and teaching buildings were modern and very well-designed. We didn’t stay long though — the cold was starting to get to my parents, so we left through the south gate.
Tonight, I met up with an old friend I’ve known since kindergarten who now lives in Beijing. It was great to reconnect, go shopping, talk about our IB classes and school, and enjoy a hotpot dinner. I’m looking forward to the events and award ceremony tomorrow!
December 8, 2024
The ceremonies and events today are in Tsinghua’s main building. Here is a photo I took before the events:
The first event of the day is the Science Forum, where world-leading scientists were invited to give presentations on their research. There were many interesting topics presented, like:
- Mathematics in material science
- Efficiently allocating contracts among competing producers
- The story of the educational short film, “The Man from the 9 Dimensions”
After the Science Forum came the Award Ceremony. I was awarded an Honorable Mention in Computer Science!
The final event of the night was the celebratory Banquet, where contestants shared their thoughts and experiences conducting research and participating the competition.
On the bus to the banquet hall, I met a physics teacher from Taiwan who had mentored a well-received research project about the static friction between interleaved pages of a book. Despite not really knowing the Mandarin counterparts to my physics vocabulary, we still had an intriguing conversation about our physics curricula and Lagrangian mechanics! Passion for STEM truly transcends language barriers.