| Biography |
|---|
| Nicholas is a Grade 11 student at Holy Trinity School. When not leading the robotics team, studying for a math contest, programming, or thinking about programming, Nicholas likes to read, ski, and blog. At school, he founded the HTS Hawks Robotics team, helps produce the school yearbook, was a member of the winning York Engineering and Science Olympics team, peer tutors mathematics, and has received the General Proficiency award for his academic average for the past four years. Outside of the classroom, Nicholas participates in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program, the Fields Institute Math Circles, and contributes to his small open source software projects. This past summer, Nicholas attended Shad Valley UBC, where his team received attention from the national media for their project, an automatically locking wheelchair break. During the summers, Nicholas spends his time programming, learning, and working as a Student-on-Call at the IBM Toronto Lab in Markham, Ontario. Once he graduates from high school, Nicholas hopes to pursue an undergraduate and graduate education in computer science and mathematics and eventually pursue a career in a related field. |
| Nicholas Schiefer
Apodora: Markov Chain-Inspired Microsearch
| Challenge: | Information | | Category: | Senior | | Region: | York | | City: | Pickering, ON | | School: | Holy Trinity School | | Abstract: | A novel information retrieval algorithm called "Apodora" is introduced, using limiting powers of Markov chain-like matrices to determine models for the documents and making contextual statistical inferences about the semantics of words. The system is implemented and compared to the vector space model. Especially when the query is short, the novel algorithm gives results with approximately twice the precision and has interesting applications to microsearch. |
| Awards | Value | The Actuarial Foundation of Canada Award
Senior
Sponsor: | $1 000.00 | Challenge Award - Information
Senior
Sponsor: Intel of Canada, Ltd. | $1 000.00 | Excellence Award - Senior
Gold Medal
Sponsor: Youth Science Canada | $1 500.00 | Dalhousie University Faculty of Science Entrance Scholarship
Senior Gold Medallist - $5000 Entrance Scholarship
Sponsor: Dalhousie University, Faculty of Science | $5 000.00 | UBC Science (Vancouver) Entrance Award
Senior Gold Medallist - $4000 Entrance Scholarship
Sponsor: The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) | $4 000.00 | University of Manitoba Entrance Scholarship
Senior Gold Medallist - $5000 Entrance Scholarship
Sponsor: University of Manitoba | $5 000.00 | The University of Western Ontario Scholarship
Gold Medallist - $4000 Entrance Scholarship
Sponsor: University of Western Ontario | $4 000.00 | University of Ottawa Entrance Scholarship
Senior Gold Medallist - $4,000 Entrance Scholarship
Sponsor: University of Ottawa | $4 000.00 | | Total | $25 500.00 | |
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