A senior at A&M Consolidated High School has won a $100,000 scholarship.
Kensen Shi competed in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, considered the nation’s premier research competition for high school students.
Shi and three other students joined a highly selective group of 13 individual competitors and 13 teams who have previously been awarded Grand Prizes in the Siemens Competition.
Shi’s project was titled, Lazy Toggle PRM: A Single-Query Approach to Motion Planning.
WTAW’s Bill Oliver visits with Kensen Shi.
According to a story on the CSISD website, Shi has won honors in a variety of mathematics and science competitions. As Texas American Regional Mathematics League Gold Team captain, he led his team to 13th place nationally. He placed 21st nationally in the USA Computing Olympiad Gold Division and was a US National Chemistry Olympiad finalist. He is also an accomplished pianist, having won numerous awards in the Houston Forum Young Artists Piano Competition. Shi aspires to become a professor and researcher in computer science.
More information is courtesy of Siemens:
“Kensen Shi designed a faster algorithm for robot motion planning, a very challenging problem in robotics,” said competition judge Dr. Shashi Shekar, McKnight Distinguished University Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. “Imagine a robot from Transformers choosing a path and appropriate shape such as a dog or a snake to navigate a collapsed building to reach survivors after an earthquake. Finding a solution quickly matters. A critical component is computation time to figure out a path and shape sequence. In many cases, Kensen’s algorithm is two to four times faster than previous algorithms in terms of computation time.”
“For a high school student, it is very impressive work. His results are comparable to those of a PhD student beginning their thesis. He connected the dots between two algorithmic ideas called ‘Toggle’ and ‘Lazy’ to bring them together in an effective way.”
Kensen has won honors in a variety of mathematics and science competitions. As Texas American Regional Mathematics League Gold Team captain, he led his team to 13th place nationally. He placed 21st nationally in the USA Computing Olympiad Gold Division and was a US National Chemistry Olympiad finalist. A senior, he is captain of his school’s Science Bowl team, which placed second regionally for two consecutive years. President of the Math Club, he presented a series of seminars on advanced topics and qualified for the USA Junior Mathematical Olympiad. He is an accomplished pianist, having won numerous awards in the Houston Forum Young Artists Piano Competition. He also loves to swim. Kensen aspires to become a professor and researcher in computer science. He was mentored by Dr. Nancy Amato, Texas A&M University.