Milo Shan is on his way to Texas to share his innovative ‘Soil Moisture Prototype’ which has earned him several accolades to date!
Johannesburg, South Africa (11 May 2023) – Milo Shan is being praised for his hard work and innovative thinking which has earned him a chance to head to Texas. His school, St Johns College, reached out to share his accomplishments and how proud they are of all he is about to accomplish!
St John’s Sixth Form is incredibly proud of Milo Shan (UVI Runge), whose award-winning research project, SMARter: Soil Moisture Artificially Intelligent Regression, used in a domestic garden environment to conserve water, won a number of awards at the Eskom Expo for Young Scientists late last year.
Milo walked away with a Gold Medal, Top Senior Scientist Award, Top Project in the Computer Sciences and Software Development category, the SAICE Water Engineering Division Award and the Eskom Best Innovation Project.
He will be travelling to Dallas, Texas, in the USA this month, showcasing SMARter at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) from 14 to 19 May.
SMARter is the result of his curiosity in the sprinkler systems that were turned on at illogical times in his neighbourhood. With the sad reality of water scarcity in South Africa, Milo decided to investigate which learning machine model could produce the most accurate high-resolution soil moisture prototype. The goal was to build an intelligent sprinkler system that would reduce water waste, while maintaining plant health and quality.
“I collected and compiled a multimodal dataset of the environmental parameters of my garden and used it to train several machine-learning algorithms. I then evaluated the accuracy of soil moisture predictive models created by these algorithms,” said Milo.
In his findings, he found that the Random Forest algorithm was able to produce a model accurate enough for it to be used in applications such as irrigation systems.
Milo credits his achievements to his grandparents who introduced him to the world of science, technology, and engineering at the early age of three.
“My grandparents used to read science articles from encyclopedias every night,” said Milo.
He is setting out into the world to do great things! So remember his name, he will be making South Africa very proud too!
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