This honor is given to “recognize and empower promising young scientists in the U.S. who are creating the ideas and solutions that will address our world’s most urgent challenges.”

In applying for the honor, John submitted independent research he conducted on speech emotion recognition using machine learning. “I wanted to fix the problem of Amazon Echo and Google Home still being limited to understanding only the word-level content of human voice,” he says. “I developed a new machine learning model addressing the limitation of conventional emotion recognition systems and achieved state-of-the-art performance.”

As part of the award, John will receive a $2,000 scholarship and Menlo will receive a $2,000 grant to fund STEM activities. 

“This honor means a lot to me,” says John. “Menlo’s strong computer science classes became a strong foundation to initiate my research, and I encourage other Menlo students to jump into research problems they are interested in.”

On Tuesday, January 23, John could also be named as one of 40 finalists, who each receive $25,000 and are invited to Washington, DC for the final competition in March. This year, approximately 2,000 students entered the competition, and honored scholars hail from 184 American and international high schools in 38 states, the District of Columbia, and two countries abroad.

John plans to study computer science in college.