Young Ontario Scientist Discovers Novel Method of Searching Small Web Documents

For his first science fair project, Nicholas Schiefer developed a better way to search small web documents, such as tweets and news headlines.  Nicholas’s project, “Apodora: Markov Chain-Inspired Microsearch” used limiting powers of Markov chain-like matrices to determine models for documents and make contextual statistical inferences about the semantics of words. 

Nicholas’s project won numerous awards at regional and national science fairs this year and has brought on a slew of attention from the media.  At the York Region Sci-Tech Fair in April, Nicholas won the 2011 UOIT Innovation Award.  At the Canada-Wide Science Fair in May, he won a gold medal, the senior Information Challenge Award, the Actuarial Foundation of Canada Award as well as scholarships to five universities across the nation.  In August, Nicholas was featured in The Globe and Mail and in September, he was a speaker at TEDxToronto.

In addition to his participation in local and national science fairs, Youth Science Ontario selected Nicholas as one of 20 Team Canada representatives to attend the International Movement for Leisure Activities in Science and Technology (MILSET) Expo-Sciences International in Bratislava, Slovakia in July.  This event originated in Quebec in 1987, occurs every two years and is an international pre-college exhibition of youth scientific projects. 

Nicholas is heavily involved in numerous programs at his high school in York region, including the HTS Hawks Robotics team, the York Engineering and Science Olympics team, yearbook, and peer tutoring.  Outside of the classroom, Nicholas likes to read, ski and blog but most of his time is devoted to programming.  Nicholas is interested in pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science and mathematics.

Congratulations Nicholas on your great achievement!

Photo credit, Toronto Star