Intel ISEF is the world’s largest student science competition. Zvezdin Bessarabov and Chavdar Lalov competed with 1,700 participants from 81 countries in Pittsburgh for a prize pool of over US$ 4 million. The Bulgarian participants won two special awards and one prize of the main jury. This is the first year in which the entire Bulgarian team won Intel ISEF awards and is also one of the most successful years for our country. Bulgaria has been participating in Intel ISEF since 2013, the participation being funded by the Club Young Scientists with the support of Intel and the Society for Science and the Public. More than two thirds of our participants up to now have participated in the events of HSSIMI (УчИМИ) and other initiatives of IMI-BAS and SMB. Chavdar Lalov, with his project “Generating Functions of the Free Generators of Some Submagmas of the Free Ω-Magma and Planar Trees” won third award of the main jury and third award of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), one of the most prestigious professional organizations in this science in the world. In this way, Chavdar, who is working under the scientific guidance of Acad. Vesselin Drensky and Rumen Dangovski (two-time participant and laureate of Intel ISEF – 2013-2014), kept the tradition each year a Bulgarian participant to be distinguished by AMS. Chavdar is a 11th grade student at the Mathematical High School in Pleven. He is a laureate of EUCYS, as well as the last year’s Bulgarian participant in Expo Science Luxembourg, and is about to participate in the six-week research school RSI at MIT. His project explores some of the most basic algebraic structures, the free omega-magmas, generalizing and solving a problem introduced by Drensky and Holtkamp in 2008. The results solve a particular case of one of the variations of 14th Hilbert’s problem. Zvezdin Besarabov, with his work “Predicting Digital Asset Market Based on Blockchain Activity Data”, received an award for intelligent solutions in the field of cyber security – a scholarship for his future studies from the King Abdulaziz and His Companions Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity “Mawhiba”. Zvezdin is an 11th grade student at the National High School of Mathematics and Science. He is the winner of the John Atanasoff Presidential Diploma for a Breakthrough in Computer Science and a participant in a number of international forums (Expo Science Milset, ICYS, WACOM Inkathon, etc.) and is currently part of the Comrade Cooperative. His advisor is the founder of the cooperative – Todor Kolev. His work analyzes public blockchain data, extracting important moments from such data, and implements deep neural networks to predict future events such as price, interest, stability, etc. Both students are long-standing participants in the events of the High School Student Institute of Mathematics and Informatics. Leader of the Bulgarian team was the Ph.D. student Konstantin Delchev from the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Two more students connected with Bulgaria won prizes. Sophia Tomov, an American student of Bulgarian origin, and Parth Raghav, a participant in the Summer Research School of HSSIMI in 2016, also received awards from Mawhiba, and Parth took third prize from the Association of Computer Engineers (ACE), one of the oldest and most respected organizations in the world of computer technology.
