Local student captures gold with science project
When 15-year-old Ali Rizvi heard his name called as a gold medal winner at the Canada-wide Science Fair, he couldn’t quite believe it.
“They go through bronze and then I thought, ‘OK, so I’m not winning a bronze, all right. It might be silver.’ And then they go through silver, and I’m like, ‘Oh I’m probably not getting anything this year’ because it’s, you know, nobody expects to win gold,” Rizvi said in an interview.
“When they announced my name for gold I just tried to keep myself calm and collected while I went up — but yeah, it was a mix of emotions ... winning the medal was just amazing. It was surreal.”
The Grade 10 student at Campbell Collegiate won gold for his project titled Detecting Exoplanets Using Supervised Machine Learning, competing in the category for Grades 9 and 10 students.
Out of the 150 students in his age group, he was one of 10 who received a gold medal. Rizvi also picked up the Excellence in Astronomy Award.
By creating a computer program and showing it examples of what an exoplanet (planets outside of Earth’s solar system) looks like, Rizvi used artificial intelligence to look for new exoplanets.
“In the (NASA) data, we have examples of what an exoplanet’s signal looks like so I gave my computer program examples of what it looks like so it can learn from it and apply it to new data and look for exoplanets in new, unexamined data ... and discover more,” he said.
He started researching the idea in November and began coding the program in January to have it finished in time for the Regina Regional Science Fair that took place mid-april. From there, he was one of three students selected from Regina to compete in the Canada-wide Science Fair held in Fredericton May 11 to 17.
Creating his program meant a lot of trials and errors and many moments of frustration wondering why it wasn’t working. But Rizvi said his love of astronomy and coding kept him motivated to work through the challenges.
“I have a passion for astronomy and I like programming so this seemed like a natural fit between the two interests,” he said.
“It was a lot of learning to get knowledgeable enough to make sure I’m not messing anything up and then after that it just took a lot of iterations and whatnot to be able to get it to a point where it was acceptable and the results were satisfactory.”
But the lifespan of his project doesn’t end with a gold medal.
Rizvi, who wants to pursue a career in computer science or computer engineering after graduating high school, said he plans to continue improving his project with the hope that it will eventually be refined enough that space agencies can use his algorithm.
“There’s lots of ways to improve on the model, so I’ll probably pick one and go from there,” he said. “I can train it better, I can get a wider data set or I can use a different algorithm, so those are all floating in my head.”