Michael Sheng Cherkassky
MINNESOTA
Michael Sheng Cherkassky, 17, of Edina, entered a computer science project
in the Intel Science Talent Search, that applied two statistical machine
learning classification methods to improve the accuracy of heart disease and
breast cancer diagnoses. Machine learning is concerned with the question of how
to program computers to learn from experience. Michael was inspired to apply
machine learning to medicine after witnessing the misdiagnosis of an anemic
relative in an emergency room where, he says, more than 20 percent of cases are
typically misdiagnosed. He is sole author of the paper about his project
appearing in Chance, published by the American Statistical Association,
describing how his computerized methods resulted in diagnostic accuracies up to
98 percent. Most of his research was conducted from his home lab consisting of
"my desk, my laptop and a diet Coke." At Edina High School, Michael is
co-president of the philosophy club and captain of Destination Imagination. A
violinist and pianist, he founded a volunteer group to play classical music at
area retirement homes. The son of Vladimir Cherkassky and Beihua Anna Sheng, he
hopes to attend Harvard or Stanford.
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