Taiwan students shine at Indonesian science competition

台灣學生在印尼科展中表現出色

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Four research projects by Taiwan high school students won three silver and one bronze medals at the World Innovation Science Project Olympiad in Indonesia, showcasing Taiwan’s achievements in science education and student creativity.

The National Taiwan Science Education Center led the students to participate in the event, which attracted young participants worldwide and featured categories including biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, AI, and the Sustainable Development Goals, per CNA.

Two students from National Hualien Senior High School won a silver medal for a project that studied security risks in speech recognition technology. Their research explored how speech models could be misused to reveal a speaker’s personal information.

To address the issue, the students proposed ways to make speech systems safer, such as limiting the length of voice samples and adding random noise to the audio. They also tested different simulated misuse scenarios on speech models and compared the results using human speech and non-speech data to better understand how these systems can be protected.

A student from Taipei First Girls High School won a silver medal for a project that uses machine learning to better detect gravitational waves — ripples in space caused by massive cosmic events such as black hole collisions. By analyzing real and simulated signals from databases and applying machine learning methods, she developed a more accurate way to detect these signals.

Another silver medal went to a student from Taipei Municipal Huajiang Senior High School for a project on analyzing mosquito wing sounds and their applications in pest control. She built a recording box to capture the sounds and conducted experiments using them to attract mosquitoes. The research can be applied to studying mosquito egg-laying behavior and designing mosquito traps.

Three students from Taipei Municipal Neihu Vocational High School won a bronze medal for a project that combines AI, mechanical, and electronic technologies to develop a robot that can read sheet music and play the bamboo flute. The robot can mimic human mouth shapes, airflow, and finger coordination while converting musical notes into instructions for playing.