🇺🇸 Anika Puri

The problem she chose

Anti-poaching patrols cover enormous areas with few people. Drones with thermal cameras have been used for years to extend that reach at night, but the footage still has to be watched, and a warm shape in a dark field can be an elephant, a ranger, a vehicle or a poacher.

Software that makes that distinction turns hours of video into an alert. The Society for Science describes Puri's project as low-cost machine-learning software analysing infrared drone videos to detect elephant poachers with 91 per cent accuracy, using systems costing about $300.

Elephant poaching is a logistics contest as much as a criminal one. Reserves are measured in thousands of square kilometres, patrol teams in dozens of people, and the advantage lies with whoever knows where the other side is not. Anything that converts raw surveillance into a timely warning attacks that asymmetry directly.

Why the price tag is the point

The accuracy figure is what gets quoted; the cost figure is what matters. Conservation technology has a long record of impressive systems that never leave the demonstration because a reserve cannot buy, maintain or repair them.

A detection system built around roughly $300 of hardware sits in a different category. It can be duplicated, lost, replaced and deployed by organisations whose budgets are counted in vehicles and salaries rather than in research grants. The organiser's announcement gives that price and that accuracy but not the datasets, the model architecture or any field-trial results, so the figures stand as reported rather than independently verified here.

The award, and what it recognises

The Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication, worth $10,000 in 2022, is given for the ability to explain a project as well as to build it. That is a meaningful distinction at a fair judged almost entirely by interview, where finalists spend a full day defending method and interpretation to rotating panels.

The same cycle saw the $75,000 top award go to Robert Sansone of Florida for a magnet-free electric motor, $50,000 awards to Abdullah Al-Ghamdi of Saudi Arabia and Rishab Jain of Oregon, and the $10,000 innovation award to Amon Schumann of Berlin for solar balloon probes.

The scale of the fair

Regeneron ISEF 2022 was held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta on 12 and 13 May, with 1,750 finalists from 49 US states and 63 countries, regions and territories competing for nearly $8 million in awards.

Maya Ajmera, president and chief executive of the Society for Science, said of the group that "every single Regeneron ISEF finalist has shown true dedication, passion, and grit." Every one of them had already won a qualifying competition somewhere else.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the award, the amount, her age, her home town, the 91 per cent accuracy figure and the approximate $300 system cost, all as published by the fair's organiser.

Open: whether the software was deployed with any conservation organisation, whether the accuracy has been reproduced independently, and what Puri has done since May 2022. None of that appears in the sources gathered for this page, and nothing has been assumed in their place.

For a reader arriving from a search engine, the useful summary is short. The award and the reported figures are solid and come from the organiser. The afterlife of the project — pilots, partnerships, publications — is simply unrecorded in the material available here, and no substitute has been invented for it.