FIRST Newsletter - June, 2010
"Flaming Chickens" Seniors Win Top Honors at International Science and Engineering Fair; Head to Harvard, MIT with Winnings
Two was the lucky number for Yale Fan and Kevin Ellis, FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 1540 members who won the "Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award," presented each year to two of the top three individual projects at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held this spring in San Jose, CA. 
Mixed metaphors aside, the "Flaming Chickens" seniors ? both students at The Catlin Gabel School, Portland, Oregon ? certainly had a lot to crow about: as top winners each received $50,000 for their efforts. According to Intel Communications Manager Bill MacKenzie, this is the first time in the fourteen years in which Intel has sponsored the event that two of the top three winners have come from the same school.
In congratulating Fan and Ellis, Dale Yocum, Team Coach and Robotics Program Director at Catlin Gabel said, "You would think they’d be strutting around like peacocks, but they are the most modest, genuinely kind people you are likely to meet. If you didn’t ask them directly about it they probably wouldn’t even volunteer they. had won."
Ellis, of Vancouver, Oregon, also gives credit to Andrew Merrill, the school’s computer science teacher, and says it was Merrill who got him interested in computer science research ? supporting, guiding, and encouraging him along the way. In fact, Ellis says Merrill recently started offering a special class because so many of the students at Catlin Gabel expressed an interest in pursuing original research in computer science.
Ellis has been a member of the "Flaming Chickens" for four years, and is this year’s Team Captain, Software Manager, and Driver. He says he clocked about 200 hours during the most recent FRC build and competition season, in addition to the time spent researching and developing his winning science fair project, "Automatic Parallelization through Dynamic Analysis." As part of his project, Ellis developed a method to automatically speed up computer programs by analyzing the programs while running so that work could be divided across multiple microprocessors. Ellis also won "Best of Category" and "First Award" in the Computer Science category at the competition. He will attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) next fall, where he plans to pursue studies in math, physics, computer science, and robotics.
"The FIRST Robotics program at Catlin Gabel has taught me so much. In addition to hands-on software engineering skills, I have appreciated the ability to learn more about both teamwork and hard work ? two areas that FIRST emphasizes," added Ellis.
Fan, of Beaverton, Oregon, was part of the software department for the "Flaming Chickens" this past year, and is one of the most cross-trained members of the team, with advanced certifications in Software, Control Systems, Fabrication, and Design. His project, "Adiabatic Quantum Evolution for NP-Complete and Physical Problems," demonstrated the advantages of quantum computing in performing difficult computations. In addition to the Intel award, Fan also won "Best of Category" and "First Award" in the Physics & Astronomy category at the competition. He will attend Harvard University in the fall and plans to major in physics and math, while continuing studies in computer science.
"This award is simply a product of hard work and passion; we conducted research not for the purpose of winning such awards, but simply to follow our personal interests. My best experience on the FIRST team has been meeting many like-minded peers. It has made my time in high school more enriching not only intellectually, but also socially," said Fan.
For the past 61 years, the international fair has been coordinated by the Society for Science & the Public ? a non-profit organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education, and sponsored by Intel Corporation since 1996. This year’s finalists were selected from 539 affiliated fairs around the world, after which their projects were evaluated by more than 1,000 judges with Ph.D.-level credentials from a wide range of scientific disciplines.
Fellow Catlin Gabel student Vignesh Shiv won a 4th Award in the computer science category for a computer program that automatically converts audio files to sheet music.
