Past Events
What happened?
On a sunny morning on Oct 19th, over five thousand people gathered at Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. and participated in the ‘Race for Every Child’ 5K Run. This is a fundraising event held annually by Children’s National Hospital. All the money donated and raised will be used to advance world-class, pediatric care and groundbreaking research at Children’s National Hospital.
What did we do?
We are proud to be one of the teams that organized the fundraising and participated in the Run. Some of our runners finished in 15th place in their age group. Our team captain has won the 5K medal for organizing the donation efforts. We want to thank all who have donated. We appreciate your great generosity in helping our children grow up stronger!
What is The 7Q Foundation?
The 7Q Foundation is a non-profit organization similar to ours in that it focuses on improving the lives of neurodivergent people, especially in their growing years. They offer programs such as social skills acceleration and music classes; SpecialSTAR is proud to be a partner with them and Zidan's family!
More information on The 7Q Foundation, found by Zidan and his family, can be found on their website: https://www.7q-foundation.com
What did we do?
The 7Q Foundation officially launched their organization during this event, bringing dozens of families and similar organizations to gather and celebrate not just the start of a new organization, but Zidan's birthday as well. Along with other partners, SpecialSTAR set up a booth and entertained children's curiosity with our signature gumdrop structure activity. Some of them competed amongst themselves, and all of them were happy to build something on their own!
On Feb 24th 2024, our president presented his research on classifying mental health conditions using advanced techniques from social medias at Junior Science and Humanity Symposium which was held on Washington D.C. His research and speech was well received by many field experts.
On Dec 16, 2023. Rocco presented his research paper at IEEE Big Data International Conference which was held at Sorento, Italy. His research designed and developed a novel multi-task learning AI framework to evaluate different mental health conditions from social media, such as Reddit. The conference is held annually, and only authors with accepted papers from a peer-reviewed selection process are invited to present. He got opportunity to listen to the keynote speech from the AI field experts and talk to researchers from different countries. This honor was reported in the local newspaper.
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