🇺🇸 Arya Tschand

The award

The Craig R. Barrett Award for Innovation, named for the former Intel chief executive, is one of the special prizes that sit alongside the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair's grand awards. In 2021 it was worth $10,000, and the Society for Science listed Tschand as its winner in the announcement of 20 and 21 May.

The project is described by the organiser as an artificial-intelligence model that optimises irrigation volume for individual crops using environmental data collection and analysis. That single sentence is the full published technical account; no accuracy figures, model architecture or trial data accompany it.

Why per-crop irrigation is the hard version

Conventional irrigation is a blunt instrument. A field is watered on a schedule, or by a sensor reading taken at one point, and the volume is the same for plants that differ in size, exposure, soil depth and stage of growth. The surplus runs off or sinks past the roots.

Doing it per crop means predicting demand rather than reacting to an average: taking environmental measurements, inferring what an individual plant will need, and setting the volume accordingly. It is a forecasting problem before it is a plumbing problem, which is why a machine-learning model is the natural tool.

Agriculture is also where the water actually goes. Irrigation accounts for the largest share of freshwater withdrawal in most farming regions, so an efficiency gain measured in single-digit percentages translates into volumes no household conservation campaign can match. That is the argument for spending machine learning on a watering schedule rather than on something more glamorous.

The 2021 fair

Regeneron ISEF 2021 was the first entirely virtual edition in the competition's history of more than seventy years. More than 1,800 finalists from 49 US states and 64 countries competed for over $5 million, defending their projects to judges over video.

Maya Ajmera, the Society's president and chief executive, described the cohort as students who "persevered in their pursuit of science in the face of the myriad challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic." The top award that year, the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award, went to Michelle Hua of Troy, Michigan; the $50,000 Gordon E. Moore Award went to John Benedict Estrada of Fresno, California, for infrared detection of drought stress in plants.

Two water projects, one fair

That pairing is worth noticing. In the same year, at the same competition, two teenagers independently attacked agricultural water use from opposite ends: Estrada building a way to see stress that has already begun, Tschand building a way to calculate the volume that would prevent it.

Neither project is documented beyond the fair's summary, so no claim can be made here about field deployment or comparative performance. What the record shows is that judges at the largest pre-college science competition in the world put water efficiency into two of their named awards in a single cycle.

What is documented — and what is not

Documented: the award, the amount, his age, his home town and the one-line description of the model, published by the body that ran the fair.

Not documented in these sources: any subsequent university, publication, patent, start-up or interview. The published trail ends in May 2021, and that is stated here rather than papered over with guesswork.