Jamaica Plain resident Zoe Xi, a high school senior at Boston University Academy, has been selected as a Top 40 finalist in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search.
“Society for Science and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. congratulate the 40 finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2022, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors,” Society for Science stated on its website.
“The 2022 finalists were selected from more than 1,800 highly qualified entrants based on their projects’ scientific rigor and their potential to become world-changing scientists and leaders.”
Additionally, “The 2022 finalists’ research projects span a diverse range of STEM-related subjects, showcasing a breadth of knowledge and depth of passion for science,” according to a press release.
As a finalist, Xi won $25,000 in the competition for her project titled “Approximation Algorithms for Dynamic Time Warping on Run-Length Encoded Strings.”
Xi told the Gazette that she was “really excited” when she got the call announcing the honor. “I wasn’t really expecting the phone call at all,” she said.
Boston University Academy is affiliated with Boston University, and offers its juniors and seniors the option to take courses at Boston University.
“I’ve tried to take advantage of that,” Xi said, adding that she has taken “several courses in math and computer science” at the university.
“I became especially interested in algorithms after taking an introductory algorithms course at BU,” she said.
Xi noted her research mentor, who won third place in this competition in 2014. “He inspired me to also pursue the competition and he helped me with the application and stuff,” she said.
Xi has been working on this project since March of last year, and she explained that her project includes dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithms, which is a “similarity measure for comparing strings that encode time series data.”
She said that DTW has “a lot of applications, some of which are bioinformatics, signature verification, and speech recognition.”
For her research she look at “dynamic time warping in some special kinds of strings,” including run-length encoded strings, and she created algorithms for these strings. “They approximate the distance between these run-length encoded strings instead of computing exact,” she said, which “provide a very good approximation” that is faster than algorithms, as standard algorithms can be “too slow for practical applications.”
Xi said that she plans on going to college next school year, and has gotten into MIT and the California Institute of Technology so far, and is waiting to hear back from Stanford University.
“I’ll decide after those results are out,” she said, and hopes to major in computer science and potentially math as well. She said she aspires to work in academia in theoretical computer science.
ccording to the press release, a competition will be held from March 9-16, where finalists will “undergo a rigorous judging process and compete for more than $1.8 million in awards.” Finalists will also have the chance to present their research and connect with scientists at a “Public Day” virtual event on March 13.
The top 10 winners of this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search are expected to be announced during a virtual awards ceremony on March 15.