‘I teach myself mostly’: Student wins BT Young Scientist awards with project to detect ‘deepfakes’

CORK student Greg Tarr has been announced as the winner of the 57th BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE) for his project to detect ‘deepfake’ digital content.

The Bandon Grammar pupil (17) took home the €7,500 cheque and BTYSTE perpetual trophy for his project.

Greg used artificial intelligence (AI) to devise a detection system which he believes is more accurate and quicker than those in regular usage.

The system, which uses advanced machine-learning techniques, was entered in the technology category at this year’s virtual BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition. ‘Deepfakes’ refer to manipulated videos and other digital representations produced by sophisticated AI, creating fabricated images and sounds that appear to be real and are very convincing.

Greg said these videos had already caused major detrimental social impact, with concerns around influence on elections and facilitating fraud.

Deepfakes have become such a big problem that large tech companies came together in 2020 to offer a $1m prize in an effort to tackle detection.

Speaking about the inspiration behind his innovative project, he revealed he taught himself to code at a very young age.

“I’ve been researching artificial intelligence for the better part of five years and I’ve been coding for seven or eight years.

“I teach myself mostly. It started with online tutorials but you get to a point where you can just start exploring topics on your own,” he told the Irish Independent.

Greg expressed hopes that his project would help raise more awareness about the dangers of deepfakes, which he believes is an essential step towards combating the problem.

“I believe most of the world’s problems can be solved with some sort of technology,” he added.

Also celebrating their victory at the 57th exhibition were Abby Mullins, Chloe Murphy and Megan Carroll from Moate Community School in Co Westmeath.

The girls won overall best group for their project ‘Wool – Savior of Our Sea’, which looked at a way of developing a wool blanket which allows for the timely and thorough removal of oil slicks following oil spills.

Chloe said the group were in shock when they found out the news they had won.

“We were really, really happy. Considering how high of a standard the projects were, we were very surprised that we won,” she said.

Chloe revealed that the inspiration for the project came to them when they found out about an oil spill in the Arctic Circle last year.

“We were looking at the measures already in use to clean up oil spills such as hair and nylon, but they were all either very expensive or harmful to the environment so we examined if wool could clean up oil spills.

“We found out that it could, so we decided to test different breeds of wool to see which one absorbed the oil best – because they had different levels of lanolin and fibres so each one had a separate impact,” she said.

Chloe said that teamwork was the key to success behind the project.

“We were all friends beforehand so we found we could really rely on each other and we just really worked well as a team.

“Both of the girls did really amazing work throughout the project and we were always helping each other,” she added.

Head of the BT Young Scientist Competition Mari Cahalane said the standard of competition was exceptionally high this year and that it was hard to decide on who would be the final qualifiers.

“We got over 1,300 applications so we were delighted with the quality and quantity of projects we got there, as it gave the judges a really good idea of what was there and gave them a platform where they could pick 550 projects that were qualified for the exhibition,” she said.

‘I’ve been researching artificial intelligence for the better part of five years’