Plainfield Sophomore Earns Silver at National Competition

Submitted by Plainfield School District 202

Plainfield East High School sophomore Whitney Ford earned a silver medal in computer science at the national Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO) competition in Philadelphia earlier this month.

Ford’s computer science research project focused on facial recognition techniques. Her study tested the ability of the computer code to accurately predict light and dark skin tone using grayscale pixel averages using pixels from images in the Kaggle Facial Key Point Detection (KFKPD) training data set.

She competed as part of the Argonne National Laboratory ACT-SO STEM Mentoring and Research Program.

Ford was one of 11 students to go to the national competition by winning a Gold Medal in one or more of the 14 categories at the DuPage County ACT-SO organization’s 36th annual local competition held March 22, 2015.

In all, 64 students representing 29 suburban high schools took part in the DuPage County event. The students competed in Science, Business, Humanities, Performing Arts, and Visual Arts.

ACT-SO is a yearlong achievement program designed to recruit, stimulate and encourage high academic and cultural achievement among African-American high school students. The program focuses on mentoring, academic achievement and a local competition.

ACT-SO is a youth initiative of the National Association for the Development of Colored People (NAACP). There are more than 200 local ACT-SO chapters nationwide. More than 260,000 young people have participated in the program since its inception.

The DuPage County ACT-SO is sponsored by the College of DuPage and the DuPage Regional Office of Education.