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News at The Jisan Research Institute in 2009
The Jisan Research Institute Turns 41 (Kind of)
March 26, 2009
For fourteen years, beginning in 1995, the Jisan Research Institute has been active in high school science education, teaching young adults science by giving them opportunities to carry science out, and in research, exploring topics ranging from evolutionary computation to swarm engineering to green engineering. In the beginning, the task was daunting – to create a curriculum and a process that would allow young adults to create cutting edge research efforts, work them through from the beginning to the end, and present these in peer reviewed forums including conferences and journals. The students needed to get to a level of competence that would allow them to compete with professional scientists when their papers were sent to conferences or journals. The task seemed impossible.
To the Institute's founder, Dr. Sanza Kazadi, the task was just the latest challenge, in line with the kinds of challenges that his university, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) routinely expected from its students. Dr. Kazadi set himself to the task in 1995. JRI published its first paper in 1999, and it has been publishing papers ever since. JRI's more than one hundred graduates have contributed to scientific efforts in fields such as evolutionary computation, swarm engineering, fuzzy logic, and image recognition. Recently, JRI began working on green technologies, and its first two papers have appeared in the last year.
"The reason for putting together a science laboratory primarily run by students is that it connects young people with an interest in science to the very careers they are interested in before they can lose interest in it." says Kazadi. "Young people are generally very interested in science up until the age of thirteen (13), and they gradually lose interest during high school. High school science classes do not do science, they teach the results of science. As a result, the picture high school students have about science is really inaccurate, and this picture is quite undesirable as a permanent career. Young people who have a chance to actually do science, discovering and building novel facts and devices, are much more likely to have an accurate and positive impression of science."
The Institute considers a student finished with his or her study when they have completed a full research cycle. This means that the student has initiated (most times with a group of other students), carried forward, written up, and published the results of a full study of a topic in the local laboratories. When students submit their work to scientific conferences and journals for review and publication, they the fact that the authors are typically younger than eighteen (18) years is not disclosed. As a result, the students are evaluated using the same scale that is applied to older scientists. This fact does not keep these young scientists from publishing, being nominated for Best Paper Awards (as opposed to Best Student Paper Awards), and being invited to write book chapters. It has now happened forty-one (41) times.
With the publishing of its 41st paper, an invited book chapter authored by Dr. Kazadi and several students (Mr. Chan Hee Koh, Mr. Kevin Kim, Mr. Kyle Jung, Mr. Brian Kim, and Mr. Hubert Wang) and entitled The ε-axle and its application to a floating windmill, the Institute has definitively demonstrated that the JRI model works. "In many ways, the proving stage of our program has finished." says Kazadi. "Now, we're ready to move on to the next phase of the overall mission of JRI."
The next phase of JRI's mission, according to Kazadi, is to begin to work with other educational institutions to develop similar programs that are independent from the Jisan model. "It's very important that this model be adopted by other organizations, particularly by schools." comments Kazadi. "There is an opportunity here for remarkable growth of American schools and American research. By connecting the passion of young people to the experience of scientists, the productivity of many research efforts could be greatly extended. Moreover, this will rekindle the latent interest in science that many students have, resulting in a great influx of individuals interested in careers in science, medicine, engineering, and mathematics, a key goal for our educational system for the coming century."
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