When awarded his prize on the EUCYS stage, Manu Kiiskilä felt like his hard work had been recognised.
- I felt that the work I had put in had been validated and inspired me to work harder in the future, he says in an email after the contest.
The Special Donated Prize Kiiskilä won is a visit to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) headquarters in Germany for up to a week.
Kiiskilä, a third-year student at Tampereen lyseon lukio high school, studied whether computer vision could be trained using a smaller amount of data than what is currently being used in most cases. This would make computer vision more efficient and scalable. The project is titled “Evolving Deep Architectures: A New Blend of CNNs and Transformers Without Pre-Training Dependencies”.
Check out Manu Kiiskilä's work in more detail.
According to Kiiskilä the most interesting question asked by the jury was about research resources. The question was “If you had unlimited resources and time, how would you completely reinvent this project?”
- The question was very interesting because it made me think about how I could have theoretically expanded this project, and in what ways was it lacking, Kiiskilä tells.
Gathering of 143 young people
The EUCYS contest was held in Katowice, Poland, on 9–14 September for the 35th time. As many as 143 young people, aged between 14 and 20 years, took part in the event. The competitors came from 37 different countries.
In addition to Kiiskilä, Finland was represented by Kalle Wesanko and Zhiyuan Liu with their project titled "Emulation of humanlike behaviour in chess: An optimization of an MTD-f search-based chess engine". It dealt with a human-like chess machine. Matias Manninen had also been involved in the project.
Read more about their project on EUCYS’ website.
Finland's representatives were selected for the EUCYS contest from the Finnish TuKoKe science competition. The competition was organised last spring by Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland TEK and the Development Centre Opinkirjo. From next year onwards, Finland's representative will be selected via TEK's Kipinä competition. The TuKoKe science competition will no longer be held.
The aim of the EUCYS contest is to give young people the opportunity to compete with each other on an international level and to encourage them to take part in research, science and technology.
- EUCYS 2024 was a great experience, one that I will remember for a long time. Going into the competition, I knew it would be an opportunity to meet other scientists and showcase my project, but I didn’t expect how interesting and diverse the projects were. Even though it was raining every day, the atmosphere there was exciting and energetic, Kiiskilä describes his experience.