Adnan Osmani's Xwebs "mega-browser" obliged the panel of judges for Young Scientist of the Year to call in more experts, writes Karlin Lillington
It's a bit of a technology cliché that kids in the classroom know more about PCs than their teachers. Shift that situation to the Young Scientist of the Year competition, and you see what the judges are up against: a fresh generation of technologically literate and creative students whose projects often challenge the knowledge of the judges.
In the case of Mullingar student Adnan Osmani, who won the overall competition with a Web browser he calls Xwebs, the judges felt extra computing background was needed for a proper evaluation, and called in computer science academics from UCD.
The breadth, programming finesse and creativity of the project meant the judges wanted to make sure it was indeed doing what the student said it was doing, and verify that the student was capable of this level of work.
The judges had decided the piece was not only of university-level quality but, says Dr Larry Taylor, a judge from the competition's sponsor Esat/BT, "it is of the level of a final-year project by a university student and would be given the highest marks".
One of the extra judges, UCD researcher and computer science lecturer Dr John Dunnion, says: "It's important to make sure that something like this is indeed the student's own work and to understand exactly what the student has done technically. So we talked to the student and got a much better feeling for what he'd done and the level of his knowledge."
Adnan (16), who decribes Xwebs as "a megabrowser", spent two years producing about 200,000 lines of code for a browser that folds in direct, browser-based access to 120 search engines and contains five popular media players for sound and video - Quicktime, RealOne, Windows Media player, MCI and Flash Video. He also added a DVD player that can be enlarged to fill the screen or miniaturised into a small window. And it has a talking character named Phoebe, who welcomes you by name at start-up, guides a user through some of the processes of the browser, and can read a Webpage out loud for children or the sight-impaired.
The browser is based on the basic form of Microsoft's Internet Explorer that third-party developers would use. Rather than using Visual Basic, the language Microsoft developers would usually use to program for IE, Adnan used an older language called Borland C++, which meant he also had to use some Microsoft tools to translate from one language to another. These processes generate thousands of extra lines of code - a point raised by some critics who couldn't see how any single developer could write the number of lines claimed for the browser.
"The student certainly displayed enough knowledge to prove he'd written it himself, which was my first concern," says Dr Dunnion. "And it certainly is a very impressive piece of technology, a very feature-rich browser."
But what made "Adnan" and "Osmani" two of the most popular words entered into internet search engines following the competition was a speed feature he calls Hyperspeed.
Adnan says he has found a way to increase the speed at which a browser functions - in essence offering a Web user a much faster browsing experience without needing the extra bandwidth of a higher-speed internet connection.
Adnan says the process can boost browsing speeds by two to six times and has left many doubters out in the Web world, mainly because he's vague about how the speed increase is achieved.
He says the browser goes through the normal process of making a request to the internet for a Web page, going through the PC and its modem, through an internet service provider and then out to the computers in the internet's vast network. The data for the page begin to come back to the browser but the browser tells that standard process to stop and starts to process incoming information in a new way.
Adnan says the browser handles multiple requests for the information. Instead of a single stream of information, several streams are handled at once. In essence, the task of bringing over a Web page is divided into a set of smaller tasks, cutting the time it takes to reassemble a Web page on the PC's screen.
But the judges ended up evaluating the browser without considering the speed feature, as they could not independently benchmark the process, says Dr Taylor. Some, like Dr Dunnion, were also unsure of whether the process would work in the real world.
Dr Gary McDarby, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab Europe in Dublin who, though not a judge, saw the browser and spoke to the student, believes the process, as he understands it, would work. Intel's head of process engineering and a judge, Dr Leonard Hobbs, says: "Certainly the capability is there. The technique he invented seems unique."
While Adnan will see if he can patent his browser or elements of it, there's no certainty that the speed feature could be commercialised, the judges all caution.
But all emphasised that Adnan Osmani is a highly gifted programmer demonstrating computing ability far beyond his years. Dr McDarby says none of the final year projects in his undergraduate time at UCD approached what Adnan achieved with Xwebs.
