Although he took top honours at the Canada-Wide Science Fair last spring, Brendon Matusch said he didn't assume he would win any awards at the European Union Contest For Young Scientists.
But on Tuesday, the 15-year-old Grade 11 student at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School continued his winning streak.
He was awarded one of three first prizes worth €7,000 (or roughly $10,500 in Canadian dollars) at the international science fair, held in Dublin, Ireland, which had entries from 135 students from 38 countries.
He said when he found out he'd won, it was overwhelming, but he was “extremely happy.”
Matusch's project is entitled "Development of an Autonomous Vehicle Using Machine Learning." He built his own self-driving go cart, investigating techniques for the use of convolutional neural networks for autonomous driving.
The teen said taking part in the European Union contest was “an incredible amount of fun,” especially meeting all of the other participants, who he said have a lot in common with him, despite their different backgrounds.
He also got to meet people who work in the fields of autonomous driving and machine learning.
“People were generally quite impressed that I had undertaken this on my own — to actually construct a vehicle and do all parts of the process by myself without really any outside guidance or help,” Matusch said.
“I would say really that was the main reaction.”
Matusch was able to participate in the European Union contest because of his earlier win at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. A fully-funded trip to the event in Ireland was one of his prizes.
Quite a few family members decided to accompany him to Ireland, including his parents and sister and both sets of grandparents.
Sudbury.com spoke to Matusch Thursday as his family toured London, England.
“It's very interesting, and I actually enjoyed Ireland quite a lot,” he said. “It's a nice country.”
Once the teen gets back to Canada, though, he goes right back to work on his science fair efforts.
Matusch plans to enter his self-driving go cart in the Google Science Fair. “But that's very competitive,” he said.
He also spent his summer as an intern at SNOLAB, applying machine learning to the data analysis from the underground facility's dark matter experiments.
Although that project is still a work in progress, Matusch said he plans to eventually enter it into the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
He said he has plenty of thank-yous for people who have helped him with his projects, including the staff at Lo-Ellen, SNOLAB, Youth Science Canada, and Ken Westaway from the Sudbury Regional Science Fair.
“I'd really like to express my appreciation,” he said.
