Palo Alto Student Honored For Program To Combat Fake News

PALO ALTO, CA — A program to combat fake news recently earned a Palo Alto student the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. Sreya Guha, who attends Castilleja School, was among five students from across the U.S. to receive the award from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA).

Sreya built a service called "Related Fact Checks." According to a news release about her recognition, the service connects information within articles to the related fact or facts on fact-checking websites.The tool does not label articles as either fact or fiction, since many articles contain both; but instead, it provides relevant fact checks related to an article being read. A browser extension allows the service to be accessible to a wide audience with the hopes of slowing the tide of fake news.

"Facing the challenge of the abundance of fake news, Guha realized through her research that most fake news stories tend to stick to a small number of themes (anti-vaccine, anti-climate change, etc.)," according to the news release. "Even in the absence of a fact check for a particular claim, giving the reader a fact check within the same theme can help them critically understand the story they are reading."

The Cutler-Bell Prize promotes the field of computer science and empowers students to pursue computing challenges beyond the traditional classroom environment. In 2016, David Cutler and Gordon Bell established the award. Cutler is a software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems at Digital Equipment Corporation. Bell, an electrical engineer, is researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research.

"We are proud to support an effort which encourages high school computer science students to develop projects that will advance society," said Cutler and Bell. "We hope that, whatever careers these students ultimately pursue, they will consider the ways in which technology can have a positive impact on the wider world. Beyond challenging the students to stretch their skills and imaginations, developing their own projects gives students confidence."

Sreya and four other students — including Amy Jin of The Harker School in San Jose — were selected from a pool of graduating high school seniors from across the U.S. who applied for the award. A panel of judges selected the recipients based on the ingenuity, complexity, relevancy and originality of their projects.

Each award recipient receives a $10,000 prize to be used for college expenses.

The students will be honored at CSTA’s annual conference July 7-10 in Omaha, Nebraska.

"I always enjoy reading about the Cutler-Bell Prize-winning projects and the surprising technologies the students have envisioned to solve a problem in society or business," says ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. "ACM has long championed the idea that integrating computer science education throughout the K-12 curriculum fosters computational thinking—or a new way of seeing the world. The Cutler-Bell Prize-winning projects are excellent examples of computational thinking in action. ACM thanks Gordon Bell and David Cutler, our partners at the CSTA, and the computer science teachers who have guided and inspired this year’s Cutler-Bell Prize recipients."

Amy Jin of San Jose received the award for using computer vision to evaluate surgical skill and "provide individualized feedback and training to surgeons." This computer vision "coach" analyzes surgical performance through tool movements and usage patterns to reflect surgical skill and technique. By feeding surgical videos through her computational pipeline Jin has automated surgical skill assessment, focusing on efficiency, motion economy, and bimanual dexterity as areas of examination, in order to provide surgeons with information on how to improve their surgical technique and performance. Assessment results were validated by a team of surgeons.

"This work sets the stage for 'building a context-aware system' to provide surgeons with targeted feedback and training to improve their surgical performance," judges said about Amy's project.

"I am so impressed by the winning student projects, and the many other high quality submissions we received this year," said Jake Baskin, executive director of CSTA. "The winning projects are examples of the novel solutions to real world problems that students create when they have access to a high quality computer science education. I can’t wait to see the explosion in new ideas as the number of K-12 students learning computer science continues to increase."

More information about the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing can be found at Csteachers.org or Awards.acm.org.

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