BT Young Scientist 2016

I recently attended the Friday and Saturday of the BTYSTE 2016 and had a grand old time altogether. On the Friday I went up with the students from my school I'd mentored (Aoife, Ameerah, Charley and Anna) for their last day of judging and some banter.

Friday
I saw Renuka from BT Business Bootcamp with another cancer project and heard her talk about it. It was definitely complicated but really cool. She ended up getting two well-deserved prizes - Runner-Up Individual and Best Biological Project. 

Saw Sonia from Outbox Incubator with a Social and Behavioural project 

Saw Aoife, also from Outbox Incubator, with a project in the Technology section that keeps drivers awake in an effort to combat driver fatigue. That was awesome, and it was so good to see Mother Aoife again. 

Saw Emily from Bootcamp with "Nurse Nappy", a nappy with a thermometer to see if a baby is sick. 

Thought this project was really cool and super-duper technical - "A system enhanced app for improved two-factor authentication". She had her own server(s) under the desk. Wat. (Okay I know nothing about the technical side of computers, shh).

The next one I saw that I liked was "A Mathematical Model of Coffee Rust" by Gabriel Barat and Adrian Wolniak. It was funny, because they assumed I didn't know calculus and I had to be like "uh, guys". They were really lovely though and I'm glad they won Best Group and the Intel award for best Chemical, Physical, Mathematical project. 

Another of my favourites was "A structural analysis of antimalarial molecules from natural sources". The idea behind the project was really cool, the girl was lovely and she explained it so well. I think she won the Eli Lilly award for Chemistry and a category award. Definitely something that piqued my interest. 

I met up with Gabi and Ciara J then and traipsed around as Gabi got people to take photos with the Project Zilkr sign. 

After that, I talked to a guy with another cool project, this one Social and Behavioural. In "Perception: Can Our Senses Be Manipulated?" he and the other guy on his team who wasn't there at the time did experiments to show that many different senses including hearing and taste can be manipulated. He said that sight seems to be the dominant sense that overrules others, which was interesting and makes sense. 

Gabi, Luke, Leia, Tina and a bunch of other people went with me to the rocket science show after that. It was awesome. Look how eager Luke is to be picked (he wasn't). 

Here's Charley and Anna in front of their project with the Zilkr sign. 

That evening, I couldn't get into the actual arena (not a participant this year sadly) so I watched and livetweeted the livestream of the awards. My iPad died right before the winner was announced because of course it did. 

The Young Scientists, MOR and I went out for dinner then rushed to get the train back to Drogheda at 11.30. 

Saturday

On Saturday I got some sleep then went in around 11.30 and chatted to Karen from IV and saw some other friends. I talked to this guy from ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing) - that was really cool. We discussed why you'd use C (or C# or C+ or C++, I forget) instead of Python for writing certain big programs. Bluffed my way through that with my very limited programming knowledge but it was enjoyable. 

Here are Gabi and Ben being adorable with the Zilkr sign. 

I gave Jerry and Chloe complimentary tickets so we hung out in the Industry Hall, collecting freebies and doing an Intel cryptography challenge. Jerry is too good at them. 

Some squad bants before we all left and the Exhibition was over (I went back to Ben's afterwards). The end of the Exhibition is always so bittersweet. Great show, lads.