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Kevin Chen, 17, of Fremont, developed a low-cost (less than $100) ferroelectric analyzer from spare parts that is able to determine the electric characteristics of ferroelectric or dielectric materials for his Intel Science Talent Search engineering project. Ferroelectrics exhibit permanent polarization that varies in strength with an applied electric field. They have far reaching real-world applications in electronics and materials science, but until now, could only be researched with the help of multi-thousand dollar pieces of equipment. Kevin developed his analyzer — named ezyPEzy — using readily available components and wrote code for its operation in Python and C. More data needs to be gathered to fully calibrate the analyzer, but when it is complete, the software and instructions on how to build it will be released to the public. Kevin is a member of the math club and the engineering division of the Science Olympiad team at Mission San Jose High School. He's played violin with the California Youth Symphony Senior Orchestra and now participates as a member of his local Riceballs music ensemble. He also works as a tutor at the Olive Children Foundation and in his spare time, he enjoys juggling. Fluent in Chinese, he is the son of Chao- Peng Chen and Mei-Hsien Tsen.
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