Swathi Krishnan, a Rye Country Day School freshman from Stamford, Conn., recently participated in the Galaxy Division, exclusively for ninth graders, at the New York State Science and Engineering Fair, where she took first place for computer science.

Her project, “Whose Face is it Anyway? An Investigation into Whether Face Recognition Systems are Superior to Humans’ Ability to Recognize Faces,” examined how effectively humans and computers recognize faces. She compared the performance of Face Recognition Systems (FRS) using underlying algorithms to that of human subjects who answered a computer-based questionnaire using 100 different face images. Her data found computers to more effective than humans in verifying faces under any image condition. Krishnan worked closely with Jonathan Connell of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne.

She previously won a special award certificate and medallion from the U.S. Army at the Connecticut Science Fair at Quinnipiac University on March 8.

In other school science news, eighth grader Anne Kennedy of Rye recently participated in the Discovery Young Scientist Challenge for 6th – 8th grade students.  She was awarded
second place  for her project, “Improving Attention During Lecture,” which compared the efficacy of lecture and lecture with hands-on experience to overall student learning and retention of information.  She has now been invited to compete at a national competition run by the Society for Science & the Public .