The Limerick student also won a special honorary prize, which will take him to the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in Ohio next year.
Ireland has scored one of the four second-place prizes at the EU Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS), one of the most prestigious global science fairs, which was held at the Silesian Museum in Katowice, Poland this week.
Seán O’Sullivan, 18, from Coláiste Chiaráin, Limerick won the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE) earlier this year and qualified to represent Ireland at the EUCYS with his project ‘VerifyMe: A new approach to authorship attribution in the post-ChatGPT era’.
AI-generated text can be trained to resemble human-authorship and as a result, popular AI models are often used as a substitute for human writing, a problem for which no clear solution has been found.
O’Sullivan’s project considers the challenges of author verification in the context of the significant advancements in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, that is trained on much of the human-made content on the internet.
As a result, the line between human-written and AI-generated text has blurred, leaving academia and industry searching for a reliable method to determine true human authorship. VerifyMe statistically analyses variations of language patterns to determine authorship.
“VerifyMe is significantly more accurate than current AI content detection systems, with up to triple the accuracy in adversarial cases where others failed,” O’Sullivan said.
At the event, O’Sullivan won the second-place prize of €5,000 as well as the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair Prize, which includes a research trip to Ohio. “I am absolutely thrilled to take home the second place prize at the competition,” he said.
Mari Cahalane, head of the BTYSTE, said O’Sullivan is “an incredible advocate for Ireland’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) sector”.
Ireland has a strong track record in this EU competition, having won 17 first-place prizes over the past 34 years. In 2022, Aditya Kumar and Aditya Joshi won the top prize, while three other BTYSTE winners – Greg Tarr, Cormac Harris and Alan O’Sullivan – took home top prizes in 2021.
Last year saw BTYSTE’s 2023 winners Shane O’Connor and Liam Carew score a second-place prize for their project titled: ‘Assessing the impact of second-level education on key aspects of adolescents’ life and development’.
Additionally, 2023’s SciFest STEM champion, Jack Shannon, also competed in this year’s EUCYS, coming away with the International Swiss Talent Forum Award
Applications for BTYSTE 2025 are open until 5pm on 27 September 2024 and the exhibition will take place from 8 to 11 January 2025 in Dublin.
The BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, sponsored and organised by UK telecommunications giant BT, is open to students aged 12-19 years old from schools across Ireland.
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