Montgomery Blair Student Wins $100K In Siemens Competition

WASHINGTON, DC — A Silver Spring high school student won an $100,000 grand prize in the prestigious 2017 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, the nation's premier competition for high school students.

Andrew Komo, a senior at Montgomery Blair High School, won the $100,000 grand prize in the Individual category for developing a coded system that protects online auctions from threats, such as cheating and fraud, according to a news release. Komo was presented the prize at The George Washington University in DC.

Komo, from Bethesda, also scored a $3,000 scholarship for his project entitled, "Cryptographically Secure Proxy Bidding in Ascending Clock Auctions."

His project featured a cryptographic protocol designed to protect online auctions from threats including collusion and fraud by prioritizing privacy.

Bidders' bids are completely private from all other parties until the close of the auction. Despite this, auctioneers can be certain that these hidden bids are valid and know when to draw the auction to a close. Furthermore, the protocol is constructed in such a way that bidders can ensure an auction has run correctly once cryptographic information is revealed at the close of the auction, guaranteeing them an honest purchase price, the news release states.

"Andrew applied a great combination of mathematics and computer science with a practical application in mind," William Gasarch, PhD, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, said in statement. "People have long thought about this problem but no one has really come up with a clean, fast, user-friendly way of solving it. But Andrew did just that. He has applied techniques of cryptography to the problem of making sure all parties in an online auction are honest and he has implemented it in a way that could be applied soon."

Komo's system could be used for large-scale auction sites that manage billions of dollars of transactions, often run by governments. Each year, the FCC auctions off bands of the electromagnetic spectrum to communications and media companies, which need access to this resource for communications such as cell phone, radio and television broadcasts. With Andrew's system in place, such large-scale auctions could be carried out with more transparency, fairness and security.

Outside of his research, Komo is the captain of his school's computer team and economics club and is an avid tennis player. He was a finalist in the 2017 Moody's Mega Math Challenge, a national team-based math modeling competition, and came in third in the 2016 High School Forensics Challenge, one of the largest high school cybersecurity events.

Komo's mentor is Dr. Lawrence Ausubel of the University of Maryland.

For more information go to: www.siemens-foundation.org.

Photo via Montgomery Community Media