Bandon's Gregory Tarr is Young Scientist of the Year

A BANDON student is the winner of this year’s Young Scientist Exhibition.

Announced this lunch-time, Gregory Tarr, 17, a 6th year student at Bandon Grammar School is the winner of the 57^th BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE).

Gregory will now take home the top prize of €7,500 and the BTYSTE perpetual trophy for his project titled ‘Detecting state-of-the-art deepfakes’.

The announcement was made at the first ever virtual BTYSTE awards ceremony streamed live from the Mansion House.  Gregory presented his project in the senior age group of the technology category.
He impressed the judges with his project using a sophisticated artificial intelligence software program that can efficiently detect DeepFake media with state-of-the-art accuracy.

The software, which is over 150,000 lines of code, made significant improvements on speed and efficiency when compared to the current best model without sacrificing its ability to accurately detect the fake.

This tool could potentially be deployed at scale to filter out DeepFake media, making the internet a safer place.

This was Gregory’s fifth time competing at BTYSTE having competed on four other occasions in the RDS.

Meanwhile, Cian Walsh, (pictured below),

a transition year student at St Brogan's College in Bandon, has been announced as the winner of the Teagasc award at the awards.

Cian’s project looked at the social, economic and environmental benefits and drawbacks of growing hemp and to determine if it can promote sustainable farming in Ireland. Cian’s teacher is Ms Laura O’Regan.

Full story in next week’s Southern Star.