Two Ithaca High School students, Rachel Zax and Ryan Musa, were the top winners in the inaugural North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NAMCLO) March 29, which they entered at the invitation of Cornell professors.
They scored first and second out of 195 students who participated nationwide. Along with two other winners they will be invited to represent the United States at the International Linguistics Olympiad in August in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Eleven students from Ithaca High School and the Lehman Alternative Community School took part in the competition from a site at Cornell. Others entered at sites set up by Carnegie Mellon University, Brandeis University, the University of Pennsylvania and via the Internet. Zax and Musa and the other two top U.S. winners will attend a practice session in New York City and a weeklong workshop in Estonia before the competition in St. Petersburg.
NAMCLO's long-range goals are to increase the size and diversity of the pool of future scientists in linguistics, computational linguistics and human language technologies, such as natural language processing, machine translation, speech recognition and information retrieval. NAMCLO also works with the Linguistic Society of America to encourage the teaching of linguistics at the high school level.
NAMCLO is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Google, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Cambridge University Press. Similar programs have been taking place for more than 40 years in Europe; the international competition is in its fifth year.
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Alexander D. Naydich, a student at Ithaca High School, received a corporate-sponsored scholarship from Lockheed Martin.
Naydich took the 2005 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test and was named a semifinalist. To be considered for Merit Scholarship awards, semifinalists have to fulfill requirements to advance to finalist standing. In addition to submitting a detailed scholarship application, which included an essay describing activities, interests and goals, semifinalists had to have an outstanding academic record; be endorsed and recommended by a school official; and earn SAT scores that confirmed their qualifying test performance.
Naydich has also won the 2007 Leader of Tomorrow Scholarship by the New York Lottery. He is the son of Dimitri and Irina Naydich of Ithaca.Labels: financial aid, free education, high school, scholarship, student loans, study abroad |
