Professor Dimitris Samaras from the Department of Computer Science and his PhD student, Le Hou, successfully mentored a Regional Finalist in the Siemens Science Competition. High school student Veda Murthy from Lexington High School (Lexington, MA) was named a Siemens Regional Finalist for her project, Recognizing visual attributes of nuclei in digital histopathology images using a novel convolutional neural network.

Supervised by Samaras and Hou, Veda Murthy used machine learning methods to automatically recognize visual attributes of nuclei in digital histopathology images. She proposed and implemented a novel convolutional neural network based model which significantly outperformed the existing state-of-the-art method. Miss Murthy started her research with Samaras and Hou as a student in the Simons Summer Research Program. 

In total, Stony Brook University mentored 39 students in the Siemens Science Competition and 11 students out of 39 moved on to become Regional Finalists.

According to the University, "the regional finalists advance to the next round of the competition where they will vie for college scholarships ranging from $1,000 up to $100,000 and one of the most prestigious science honors awarded to high school students in the country today".

The Siemens Competition, launched in 1999 by the Siemens Foundation, was established to increase access to higher education for STEM students and is based on the culture of innovation, research and educational support.  This competition, administered by Discovery Education, seeks to "recognize and hopefully build a strong pipeline for the nation’s most promising scientists, engineers and mathematicians".

Congratulations to all on a job well done! And, best of luck as to Murthy as she begins six regional competitions over consecutive weekends in November. Then it is on to the national finals in Washington, DC, on December 5–6.