60th Annual STS (2000–2001)
Finalists
Alan Mark Dunn

MARYLAND
Alan Mark Dunn, 17, of Potomac, studied ways to optimize five encryption algorithms-software recipes used to encrypt data-for his computer sciences entry in the Intel Science Talent Search. The algorithms are being considered for the federal government's Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which will replace the aging Data Encryption Standard (DES). Encryption is a critical tool for maintaining the privacy and anonymity of electronic communications. Alan used two different strategies to optimize the five algorithms using part of the G4 processor of a Macintosh computer. Each strategy was successful to some degree, increasing the speed of most algorithms by 200 to 400 percent. Alan attends Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, is active in the math and robotics clubs, and he enjoys guitar and karate. An activist in a grass-roots superhighway campaign, he believes that "as a scientist, one has a civic duty to be involved in the public decision-making process." The son of Dr. Mitchell Dunn and Dr. Susan Lacks, Alan is co-author of a paper for the Fifteenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research. He hopes to study computer science or engineering at MIT.