The IEEE Northern Virginia section supports STEM programs for K-12 students in a variety of ways. During the 2019 regional science and engineering fair season we recognized 31 projects developed by 45 students, 14 of whom were young women, thanks to the efforts of Martin Schulman and a group of dedicated volunteers including Dan Cross-Cole, Chandra Curtis, Don Rickerson, and Melissa Stange. The large number of recognized students resulted in part from restructuring the awards at the suggestion of the fair coordinators and from including Frederick County (thanks to Marc Apter for this suggestion) in addition to Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William-Manassas fairs. For the first time in memory one of our judges (and chair of our joint-section Education Society chapter) Dr. Melissa Stange stayed for the awards ceremony and personally congratulated our winners at the Frederick County fair. 

As usual, entries covered a wide range of applications and technologies. There were robots to put out fires and to find trash on the surface of water and oil beneath the surface. Energy was conserved by measuring home insulation effectiveness, and energy was harvested from piezoelectric shoes for cell phones and from jaw motion for hearing aids. Driving was made safer through image processing to remove haze and a comparison of alternate navigation methods in GPS-denied environments. Passwords were cracked, AV programs compared, and data transmitted across air gapped computers and hidden with steganography all in the name of improved cyber security. Arduino microcontrollers and Raspberry Pi’s dispensed pills, heated divers, opened doggie doors, monitored recuperating knees, tracked eye movement, and trained running backs how to properly hold a football. 

By far the most prevalent technology in numerous entry categories this year was machine learning. Neural networks (NN) composed music, fooled CAPTCHA’s, counted salmon eggs, detected invasive species, classified tumors, analyzed EEG’s, diagnosed malaria, controlled augmented reality, analyzed sentiment on Twitter, predicted stock prices, and designed more efficient solar energy materials. Students ran CNNs, DNN’s, LSTM’s, and random forests using Python, TensorFlow, OpenCV, and other languages and frameworks. While a few projects sought to compare the efficacy of various NN architectures for specific tasks, most used them as generic, off-the-shelf tools – the multimeters of data analysis. 

Additional information about the science fairs and the fair winners can be seen for the districts that post online: 

https://www.apsva.us/science/regional-science-fair/ 

https://www.fcps.edu/sciencefair 

https://www.lcps.org/rsef 

We wish the best of luck to all students progressing to state and national finals! 

Section News 

The IEEE NoVA section in collaboration with the IEEE Washington Section held the annual award banquet on May 11th. The banquet celebrated the successes of the past year and the volunteers who made them possible. 

The NoVA Awardees are:

Special Forums, Seminars, and Conferences 

The IEEE WIE Forum USA East 2019 is going to be held November 21 – 23, 2019 in Arlington, Virginia. Planning for this forum is currently on-going. Complete information can be found at https://attend.ieee.org/wie-forum-usa-east-2019/. 

Best wishes, 

Michael Olex 

Chair, IEEE Northern Virginia Section