Kalyani Ramadurgam, 17, of San Diego. Her entry was inspired by the aftermath of last year's Boston Marathon bombing.
"I saw that the pictures of the terrorists were obscured and it took a long time to identify them," Kalyani explained. "So I designed facial recognition software that can identify faces that are looking away from the camera. It improves the recognition of obscured faces by over 50%."
How does it work? "I'll skip over the math, but I look at pixel patterns in combination with facial features," she said. "I learned how to do it by watching online courses from MIT."
