TNJSF JEI Award Winner: Andy Xu

Andy Xu is one the JEI Featured Young Scientist Award winners from the Terra North Jersey STEM Fair. His project was inspired by his fascination with superconductors that was started after Andy saw a demonstration about superconducting materials at the Franklin Institute. Andy had previous experience with machine learning research and used this experience to take a computational approach to look at novel superconducting crystals in his project.

One of the challenges with machine learning that Andy ran into is that working with small datasets can be extremely challenging. He worked to overcome this by first training his model using a larger dataset and then used a smaller dataset to further refine his model once the majority of the training had been done.

Editor's Note: Training in machine learning is the process of determining (learning) what “good” and “bad” values are for the question at hand. In most machine learning models they are trained to minimize loss of data.

Speaking about the impact of participating and presenting at TNJSF Andy said:
“[It] helped me better understand how to cater my presentation to focus on different aspects depending on the expertise of my audience. It has also showcased how emphasizing high level ‘takeaways’ of my project are often more important than specific minutia pertaining to my methodology. Finally, it has demonstrated just how important a clean and concise poster is in the comprehension of my audience.

JEI extends our congratulations to Andy for taking on such an interesting project and showing excellence in presenting his work to a general audience!

The material on this page was prepared by Kari Mattison, JEI co-Editor in Chief. Andy Xu provided the photo and answers to standard questions which was edited lightly for clarity.