VIDEO
Women in Science Encourage Girls "You Belong in the STEM Fields"
Women in Science Encourage Girls "You Belong in the STEM Fields"
ACTIVITY
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ROLE MODEL
Brittany Wenger, Teen Computer Whiz
At age seventeen, Brittany Wenger accomplished something that most teens her age could only dream of doing: She designed an app to detect breast cancer. Cloud4Cancer determines, with 99.11 percent accuracy, whether a sample of breast tissue is malignant or benign using neural networks, code that imitates the way the human brain makes decisions. Wenger won the Google Science Fair in 2012 for Cloud4Cancer, and spoke about it at a TED conference in Atlanta that year. She also was named one of TIME’s 30 under 30.
Wenger was fifteen when she started to work on Cloud4Cancer. She had been coding since middle school when she developed her first program. “I was really interested in soccer, so I had X’s and O’s running around my computer using artificial intelligence, trying to figure out when to pass or dribble,” Wenger says.
After her cousin was diagnosed with breast cancer, Wenger saw that the process of identifying cancer needed to be streamlined. She decided to use her coding chops to create a program to detect the disease in its early stages. Wenger coded up the neural network, downloaded breast cancer data from the internet and trained her code on the information, allowing it to identify the attributes of breast tissue samples that indicate cancer. The process took only a year and a half to finish.
But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Wenger was still a beginner coder. She went through many iterations to get to the final product. “What was really difficult was trying to figure out how to actually build the program, what architecture would be best supported,” Wenger says. “It was a lot of trial and error, so I spent five or six months having a lot of things flop, but I just kept trying.”
Eventually, Wenger cracked the code. Unlike others who had worked on her data set, she trained her neural network to incorporate 100 troublesome outliers, greatly improving its accuracy. She attributes her success to her can-do attitude toward the project. “I had a lot of programs that flopped in the process of building Cloud4Cancer, and I was really determined. I was a kid, I didn’t know any better. Having this mentality of ‘I’m going to keep trying till it works’ also made a big difference,” she says.
At age seventeen, Brittany Wenger accomplished something that most teens her age could only dream of doing: She designed an app to detect breast cancer. Cloud4Cancer determines, with 99.11 percent accuracy, whether a sample of breast tissue is malignant or benign using neural networks, code that imitates the way the human brain makes decisions. Wenger won the Google Science Fair in 2012 for Cloud4Cancer, and spoke about it at a TED conference in Atlanta that year. She also was named one of TIME’s 30 under 30.
Wenger was fifteen when she started to work on Cloud4Cancer. She had been coding since middle school when she developed her first program. “I was really interested in soccer, so I had X’s and O’s running around my computer using artificial intelligence, trying to figure out when to pass or dribble,” Wenger says.
After her cousin was diagnosed with breast cancer, Wenger saw that the process of identifying cancer needed to be streamlined. She decided to use her coding chops to create a program to detect the disease in its early stages. Wenger coded up the neural network, downloaded breast cancer data from the internet and trained her code on the information, allowing it to identify the attributes of breast tissue samples that indicate cancer. The process took only a year and a half to finish.
But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Wenger was still a beginner coder. She went through many iterations to get to the final product. “What was really difficult was trying to figure out how to actually build the program, what architecture would be best supported,” Wenger says. “It was a lot of trial and error, so I spent five or six months having a lot of things flop, but I just kept trying.”
Eventually, Wenger cracked the code. Unlike others who had worked on her data set, she trained her neural network to incorporate 100 troublesome outliers, greatly improving its accuracy. She attributes her success to her can-do attitude toward the project. “I had a lot of programs that flopped in the process of building Cloud4Cancer, and I was really determined. I was a kid, I didn’t know any better. Having this mentality of ‘I’m going to keep trying till it works’ also made a big difference,” she says.