Andrew is a 14 year-old student in grade 10, studying at Waterloo Collegiate Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. Andrew has always been interested in the STEM areas, founding and leading his school’s robotics team and Waterloo’s first international math team, which recently came 6th in division be at the American Regions Mathematics League. Andrew has also been nominated to lead the Science, Computer Science, Math, and Robotics teams next year, and regularly participates in math contests such as the Fermat, Euclid, CNML, and Hypatia. Andrew started doing science fair in 2012, when he won gold at his regional fair as well as an award for most promising researcher, earning him a position, and a bronze medal, at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Charlottetown PEI. After studying in the Middle East for a year, Andrew came back to attend his regional fair in 2013, where he won a gold medal, the prize for best engineering project, and the prize for best project in fair. At Canada-Wide Science Fair 2014, Andrew won a silver medal, and a fantastic experience. Andrew’s project in 2014 involved using Twitter for disaster management. After a natural disaster such as a hurricane or a tornado, Twitter is flooded with pictures, prayers, and calls for help. Some of these could be useful to crisis management groups like the red cross, but the vast majority are not. Andrew’s created an image extraction and classification program that used artificial intelligence to extract only important images from Twitter. “The most important thing is learning how to learn”, says Ilyas. He believes that if you can learn how to learn, and do what you love, then you truly have unlimited potential.
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