60th Annual STS (2000–2001)
Finalists
Aditya Vikram Sunderam

GEORGIA
Aditya Vikram Sunderam, 17, of Atlanta, submitted a computer sciences project to the Intel Science Talent Search-a system that automatically retrieves Internet news of personal interest. Adi's software sits unobtrusively on the user's computer and monitors whenever news items are downloaded. Based on that unobtrusive monitoring, the program creates a profile of the user's news reading patterns, the degree of interest and any changes in interest. Thereafter, the program refers to that profile to retrieve news items from multiple web sites for that reader. Adi claims that his personalized news retrieval system poses no threat to privacy because the profile is stored on the user's computer. Adi is first in his class of 260 students at Chamblee High School where he captains the math, academic and engineering teams and has won numerous science and math awards as well as the Yale Book Award. He holds a varsity letter in tennis and enjoys ultimate frisbee, skiing and volunteering for the Special Olympics. The son of Drs. Vaidy and Saswati Sunderam, Adi was born in India and is fluent in German. He plans to study computer science and biology at Harvard and become a research scientist in bioinformatics.