Picture Credit: Fennells Photography
Two Roscommon projects received Awards at BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition which entered it’s penultimate day today in the RDS.
Abbie Moloney (above) from Scoil Mhuire Strokestown received the 3rd place Senior individual Award in the Biological and Ecological category for her project entitled “An investigation into the quality of effluent discharging domestic Waste Water Treatment Systems (Septic Tanks) and an apparatus to improve this.”
C.B.S. Roscommon duo Jack Lohan and Michéal Beirne received a Highly Commended Award for their study of the effects of recent floods on Farms in South Roscommon. Roscommon well represented at BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition and details of all the Roscommon projects can be viewed here.
Over 1,100 students from 375 schools across the island of Ireland competed for the coveted title of ‘BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year 2017’.
Rooskey link to top prize winner
The overall winner was Shane Curran, a 16 year old, 5th year student from Terenure College, Dublin, whose mother Paula (née Hanley) hails from Rooskey.
Shane has received widespread acclaim and Awards for various projects prior to this year’s BT Young Scientist win. He won Awards at the Exhibition in 2013 and 2014 and has founded a number of companies. Shane also appeared in Junior Dragon’s Den in 2013, where he received the backing of all the “Dragons” for Libramatic – a cloud based book cataloguing system.
His winning project is entitled “qCrypt: The quantum-secure, encrypted, data storage solution with multijurisdictional quorum sharding technology”. Shane’s award includes a prize-fund of €5,000, the BTYSTE perpetual trophy, and a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. In addition, the winner will have the opportunity to represent Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Tallinn, Estonia later this year.
Speaking about the winning entry, BT Young Scientist judge John Dunnion commented;
“qCrypt is a novel distributed data storage system that provides greater protection for user data than is currently available. It addresses a number of shortfalls of current data encryption systems; in particular, the algorithm used in the system has been demonstrated to be resistant to attacks by quantum computers in the future. As part of the qCrypt project, an entire software platform with an intuitive user interface has been developed. The application has been written using state-of-the-art coding techniques.”
Other Award Winners
The award for Group winner went to students Michael Sheehan and Jack Murphy, both aged 16, 4th year students at Colaiste Treasa, Kanturk, Co. Cork for their project entitled ‘Prey availability for hen harriers in managed farmland’. The students were in the Biological & Ecological Sciences category at Intermediate level.
The Individual runner-up award was presented to Cormac Larkin, aged 19, a 6th year student at Colaiste An Spioraid Naoimh, Bishopstown, Co. Cork for his project entitled ‘Case study of Data Mining in Observational Astronomy: The search for new OB stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud’. Cormac was in the Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences category at Senior level.
The Group runners-up award was presented to Matthew Blakeney and Mark McDermott, both aged 14, 2nd year students at Jesus & Mary Secondary School, Enniscrone, Co. Sligo for their project entitled ‘Flint on the Moy? A Geological Study of an Area of Shoreline on the Moy Estuary’. The students were in the Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences category at Junior level.
The BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition continues tomorrow, Saturday 14th January, and is open to the public from 9:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. Guests can expect to be wowed by a fantastic line-up of live shows including mentalist David Meade, renowned World of Robots and TITAN the Robot.
For more information, visitors can download the free BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition app now. Alternatively, log onto btyoungscientist.com, check out facebook.com/BTYSTE, or follow on Twitter at http://twitter.com/btyste.