The Regeneron ISEF 2024 Global Finals came to an end at the beginning of last month. As a professional youth backlifting team, Embark conducts research on the winning works of major international competitions every year, and The Regeneron ISEF is also among them.

In order to give everyone a more intuitive understanding of The Regeneron ISEF’s judging style, topic selection preferences in various disciplines, and the elements of award-winning works, our Embark teaching team conducted an in-depth analysis of this year’s award-winning projects and explored the inner logic of the award-winning projects,Learn ISEF competition winning strategies  and help students prepare for the next competition.

The RegeneronISEF 2024 Global Finals Review

The Regeneron ISEF 2024 Global Finals has come to a perfect conclusion! Since 2017, Regeneron ISEF once again went to war in Los Angeles, the "City of Angels"

This year’s competition has become more intense: nearly 9 million US dollars in huge awards, prizes and scholarships, higher-level scientific and technological innovation projects, nearly 1,700 finalists from 59 states in the United States and 67 countries and regions around the world gathered here. , took their 1,338 scientific and technological projects straight to the finals!

These projects come from 22 different subject categories. In order to win the highest honor in the field of youth science and innovation, the contestants launched a fierce competition...

In this year's event, the Chinese team also showed very impressive strength. A total of 57 Chinese teams successfully entered the global finals, 3 more teams than last year! The Chinese teams include Chinese and foreign students from mainland China and students from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan (30 national teams, 5 teams from Sichuan, and 22 teams from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan).

In this year’s competition, the performance of the players from Hong Kong and Guangdong was eye-catching. Hong Kong’s Derui International School became a major focus of this year’s Chinese team competition: it not only won the first prize in the medical category, but also won a Top Award—Craig R. Barrett Award for Innovation. Contestants from Guangdong also made greater breakthroughs than in previous years and successfully won the grand prize in the finals.

• The Craig R. Barrett Award for Innovation is a prestigious award for finalists who demonstrate excellence in innovation in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The prize will be awarded to outstanding projects that delve deeply into these disciplines, successfully achieve innovative integration, and clearly demonstrate the profound impact of these integrations on our daily lives. The winners will receive a bonus of US$10,000 in recognition of their outstanding contributions in related fields.

The performance of contestants from Shanghai was still eye-catching, and two students from Shangzhong International also successfully won the Grand Awards (first and second prizes respectively)! They stood out from the Sichuan competition. Among the final five selected projects in the Sichuan competition, 3 projects were from students from Shangzhong International. This result is really gratifying. You must know that the competition in Sichuan competition is extremely fierce every year.

Compared with last year, the number of participants in ISEF this year has increased, and the number of projects has become more difficult, which undoubtedly increases the difficulty of winning awards.

Despite facing a more difficult competition environment, our Embark students still performed stably and outstandingly in this year's competition, once again exceeding expectations and showing a super high winning rate!

You must know that students who can enter the ISEF finals are already the best in the region, and our Embark students have won more than 100 awards in the preliminaries and finals, including 20+ awards in the ISEF global finals (an average of two per student or above), not only that, Youfang students have won multiple first prizes for 2 consecutive years! I have picked up my own asteroid for three consecutive years. Compared with last year's results, there has been new progress overall.

Here, congratulations to our award-winning students ~ At the same time, we hope that the students can continue to maintain excellent academic achievements, actively accumulate practical experience, and uphold and promote the competitive spirit of ISEF: I hope that by continuously exploring and improving your scientific research and academic abilities, Be fully prepared and lay a solid foundation for entering your dream school in the future!

ISEF has been successfully held for 75 times so far. Since 2020, the well-known pharmaceutical company Regeneron has taken over the organization. Its co-founder and co-chairman of the board of directors, George D. Yancopoulos, was full of praise for the talent and potential of the contestants.

He firmly believes that science competitions such as ISEF can inspire young people's enthusiasm for science and become a driving force for them to explore and pursue excellence. At the same time, he hopes that the participating students can contribute to society and achieve outstanding achievements in the future.

Analysis of the winning projects of ISEF 2024 finals ISEF 2024 award-winning projects trends

ISEF award-winning projects showcase new trends:Win-win situation of innovative thinking, detail polishing and social value.

The winning projects at this year’s ISEF Finals exhibit some striking common strengths! What is remarkable is that these projects do not deliberately pursue difficult demonstrations of technology, but rather open the door for more projects to demonstrate innovative capabilities by lowering the technical threshold. This change sent an important signal to the outside world: technical proficiency is not the only criterion, and the breadth and practicality of innovative thinking are also valued.

When evaluating projects, in addition to the innovation of the project itself, the judges pay more attention to its long-term social impact and value, as well as its profound expression of the humanistic spirit. This provides a platform for participating projects to demonstrate their profound social significance, rather than just competing on a technical level.

At the same time, award-winning projects usually have novel and unique research perspectives, and they are good at discovering innovation points from the subtleties of daily life. This keen observation and innovative thinking have won high recognition from the judges.

In a more fierce competition environment, "details will determine success or failure" : In the process of scientific innovation, the judges will be impressed by the extreme pursuit of details of the participating projects. Every link has been carefully designed and polished, improving the The overall quality and competitiveness of the project~ The contestants spent a lot of time and energy to improve the project. This persistent effort and sincere research results are also the key factors to impress the judges and win the award.

Analysis of the winning projects of ISEF 2024 finals

ISEF 2024 award-winning projects trends

ISEF award-winning projects showcase new trends:Win-win situation of innovative thinking, detail polishing and social value.

The winning projects at this year’s ISEF Finals exhibit some striking common strengths! What is remarkable is that these projects do not deliberately pursue difficult demonstrations of technology, but rather open the door for more projects to demonstrate innovative capabilities by lowering the technical threshold. This change sent an important signal to the outside world: technical proficiency is not the only criterion, and the breadth and practicality of innovative thinking are also valued.

When evaluating projects, in addition to the innovation of the project itself, the judges pay more attention to its long-term social impact and value, as well as its profound expression of the humanistic spirit. This provides a platform for participating projects to demonstrate their profound social significance, rather than just competing on a technical level.

At the same time, award-winning projects usually have novel and unique research perspectives, and they are good at discovering innovation points from the subtleties of daily life. This keen observation and innovative thinking have won high recognition from the judges.

In a more fierce competition environment, "details will determine success or failure" : In the process of scientific innovation, the judges will be impressed by the extreme pursuit of details of the participating projects. Every link has been carefully designed and polished, improving the The overall quality and competitiveness of the project~ The contestants spent a lot of time and energy to improve the project. This persistent effort and sincere research results are also the key factors to impress the judges and win the award.

Analysis of ISEF 2024 award-winning projects

Every year, we conduct in-depth analysis of the winning projects in the ISEF competition to draw inspiration and experience from them. This year, the teachers of the Embark teaching group organized an internal seminar specifically on the winning cases of the finals.

At this exchange meeting, we discussed award-winning projects in almost all subject categories. Each teacher conducted a detailed and professional analysis of these projects in the subject areas in which they are good at, from topic selection background, research methods, experiments Design, data analysis and conclusion presentation were all explained one by one to help students deepen their insights and understanding of ISEF competition.

These contents are internal materials compiled exclusively by our Embark team and are shared now to provide valuable reference and inspiration for students who are interested in participating in the ISEF competition.

Since the teachers on the Embark team have different technical expertise and interests, their interpretations of The Regeneron ISEF Project will also be different, and there may even be some imperfect views. In this article, we have selected several teachers to provide in-depth analysis of the first-class award projects, which cover a variety of subject areas. Each teacher has conducted a detailed analysis based on his or her own professional field. Although there may be some shortcomings, our original intention is to provide readers with more thinking perspectives and learning resources. We hope that everyone can draw inspiration from them and learn from each other.

We will conduct the analysis in the following order of subjects:

• Behavioral and Social Sciences (BEHA)
• Biomedical and Health Sciences (BMED
• Biomedical Engineering (ENBM)
• Cellular and Molecular Biology (CELL)
• Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CBIO)
• Embedded Systems (EBED)
• Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design (EGSD)
• Engineering Technology: Statics and Dynamics (ETSD)
• Environmental Engineering (ENEV)
• Microbiology (MCRO)
• Physics and Astronomy (PHYS)
• Plant Sciences (PLNT)
• Robotics and Intelligent Machines (ROBO)
• Systems Software (SOFT)
• Technology Enhances the Arts (TECA)
• Translational Medical Science (TMED)

ISEF 2024 award-winning projects- BEHA

BEHA-First Award

BEHA061 -  GaitNet: Assess Parkinson's Gait Disorder Severity

Project Description

This project develops an accurate, quantitative, and accessible assessment framework for the assessment of gait impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD). Through an innovative neural network, the project extracted spatiotemporal features from 3D skeletons and human body contours for the first time, achieving a high sensitivity assessment of gait disorders, reaching 91%.

In addition, the project derived significance values ​​to help doctors identify subtle changes in patients' gait and identify key parameters closely related to PD gait disorders. Finally, the project also created a low-cost web application that allows patients to quickly obtain diagnostic results of PD gait disorder through video at home, enabling early detection, personalized treatment planning and condition monitoring of PD.

This framework not only improves diagnostic accuracy but also reduces assessment costs and can be easily extended to the assessment of other gait disorder diseases.

Exclusive analysis

This technology uses cutting-edge methods in the field of deep learning to achieve accurate assessment of gait disorders by extracting key spatiotemporal features from 3D skeletal data and contours. This technology can identify 21 specific gait patterns, which has important reference value in the diagnosis and treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD). It is worth mentioning that the research team has also developed a convenient web program that allows patients to quickly generate PD gait diagnostic results by recording their gait via video at home.

In terms of technical details, this technology accurately captures the subtle movement amplitude of human posture by processing video frames, which is crucial for identifying the unique symptoms of stiffness and bradykinesia in PD patients. In addition, this research also skillfully combines energy maps (including depth maps, segmentation maps) and posture maps, and uses these multivariate data for comprehensive classification, further improving the accuracy and reliability of diagnosis.

What's even more outstanding is that this technology also uses the back-propagation mechanism of deep learning to generate gradient information and map this information to the human body model to form a so-called "saliency map." This visualization method not only helps us understand the decision-making process of the deep learning model more intuitively, but also reveals the key body areas that affect the onset of PD, providing valuable information for medical research and clinical practice. Overall, this technology demonstrates the great potential and application value of deep learning in the field of medical diagnosis.

ISEF preparation strategy:

From the above case analysis of the first-prize-winning projects in the finals, it is not difficult to see some notable features: If you want to improve your chances of winning in the ISEF competition, the focus is on the value of the project topic and the originality of the solution. and the scientific rigor of the research process.

Tip1：the topic direction and field can focus on issues that have far-reaching social significance or scientific value, such as focusing on hot issues such as treatments for major diseases, environmental protection, and care for vulnerable groups. Secondly, the proposed solution must be innovative and have significant improvements or breakthroughs compared to existing methods.

Tip2: what cannot be ignored is the scientific nature and rigor of the research process. This includes a clear research topic, in-depth thinking and exploration, rigorous logical reasoning, thoughtful experimental design, and sufficient and powerful data support. In particular, projects that have gone through multiple iterations, reached practical standards, and been verified for effectiveness in real-life use environments will be more likely to stand out in the competition and win the recognition and favor of the judges.

Tip3: If you want to stand out in a high-level scientific research competition like ISEF, topic selection is particularly critical. The topic selection should follow the three principles of feasibility, innovation and research value, because the quality of the topic selection directly affects the quality and output of the paper. To ensure successful topic selection, students are advised to start preparations as early as possible to allow sufficient time for topic exploration and information collection.

Embark Prestigious STEM Competitions will provide students with all-round guidance. From determining research directions, advancing the research process, writing papers, to final competition applications, we will provide accompanying guidance to help students progress steadily on the road of scientific research and achieve excellent results. .

The Embark team continues to increase its research and development efforts on new topics, developing simultaneously in two dimensions: depth (deep exploration and excavation of basic topics, continuing to leverage disciplinary advantages, and increasing research and development) and breadth (adding several new disciplines and new directions). Strength to match more students ’development needs and competition attributes! Through the scientific and technological courses with "TECH" as the core, Novel ISEF Project Personalization, our students can truly benefit for life.

1. Very high teacher-student ratio
   Integrated teaching of technical tutors, project tutors and subject tutors
2. Course attributes with strong research focus.
   Taking "TECH" as the core of the curriculum and focusing on practice and inquiry.
3. Highly personalized customized coaching plan Carry out personalized project research and development according to each student's situation.

• Suitable for students: middle schools in grade 9 and above at home and abroad
• Course goal: Aiming at ISEF and Conrad series competitions, and hitting the competition awards
• Subject directions: science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, biology, interdisciplinary subjects, etc.
• Course format: 1:1 teacher-student ratio
• Teaching method: online

Embark is committed to providing technical support and guidance for student competitions and improving their scientific research background. Currently, it has guided at least 2,000+ students to complete personalized scientific research projects, and led hundreds of students to participate in domestic and foreign scientific innovation competitions and achieve excellent results. Looking forward to you becoming the next one!

After an in-depth exploration of the innovation and uniqueness of the 2024 ISEF Behavioral and Social Sciences (BEHA) subject first prize project, we can see the huge potential of scientific research in practical applications. Next, we will continue to analyze the award-winning projects in the Biomedical and Health Sciences (BMED) subject and explore the breakthroughs and contributions of these projects in the fields of biomedical and health sciences. Please continue to pay attention to the next article to learn more about the detailed analysis of the 2024 ISEF outstanding scientific research projects.