Kerry students receive awards at Young Scientists competition

STUDENTS from C.B.S. Secondary School in Tralee and Scoil Phobail Sliabh Luachra received awards at the BT Young Scientists Competition, which took place in Dublin over the weekend. A total of 10 projects in all represented Kerry schools.

Liam McSherry of Scoil Phobail Sliabh Luachra was given a ‘special award’ for his investigation into Electroencephalography, and how it can help emulate human empathy and emotion in artificial intelligence. Speaking about his project, Liam said he was very pleased as it made many weeks of research worthwhile.

“It was my first science award and hopefully there will be more to come. Speaking to people from corporations who came to see my stand on the day, and how my project attracted their attention, is very good,” he said.

Liam’s project explored ‘emotion recognition’ systems that allow computers to tell emotions from different features. Liam theorized his own emotion recognition system that assessed the words we subconsciously string together and what emotional state we are in at any given time. Liam invested a huge amount of time sourcing information from third-level institutions around Ireland.

“Electroencephalography would have been new to me so I was able to reach out to people from different universities,” he said.

“I spoke with various EG departments about what my experiment would entail. It was great experimenting with and gaining new knowledge about the systems I was theorizing. My plan is to work on new aspects such as ‘sarcasm and mood’ in the future; new features that could essentially be retailed out to therapy and companies that might need it,” Liam said.

Principal of Scoil Phobail Sliabh Luachra Denis Kerins said he was delighted for Liam given the amount work he put in.

“The content of his project would be outside the scope of what we would be doing here at the school. He did a lot of research himself and it’s a huge credit to him. Liam is an excellent student who is very motivated, focused and enthusiastic.”

Tralee CBS students Josh O’Sullivan and Swithin Pais came third in their category for a project on statistical analysis into vaccine hesitancy in firstyear males. The pupils chose the HPV vaccine as it was only introduced for boys in September, 2019. A recent World Health Organisation report listed vaccine hesitancy as a top ten global health threat.