Australian takes prize in Google Science Fair
Australian Viney Kumar has won the 13-14 year age group at the Google Science Fair: That’s quite some achievement.
Kumar’s project is a signalling system for emergency vehicles that would help get other vehicles out of their way – something we really need in a world where people sit in sound-proofed stereophonic luxury oblivious to the outside world. He describes his basic idea as:
An ERV [Emergency Response Vehicle] updates its current location and route to a web service every 2 seconds. A target vehicle then translates this data into an audio visual format after periodically polling the same server. The system alerts the target vehicle with warnings at 800 and 500 metres to pull over- “Warning ERV within 500 metres : please pull over
The Grand Prize winner, Eric Chen, combined computer modelling and biological studies to focus on leads for a new type of anti-flu medicine.
The winners all received LEGO trophies, which is a nice touch, and significant swag of prizes. But surely the real prize has got to be recognition of such absolutely awesome thinking.
Image: Google.