Each month, iParenting.com spotlights a teen who inspires and moves us, who embodies the qualities that we all admire in a person, a friend, and a son or a daughter. Above all, the Teen of the Month is dedicated to making a positive mark on the planet. Rich or poor, famous or not, the Teen of the Month shines as an example of what today's teens have to offer.

January's Teen of the Month is Jerry Guo, anti-SPAM activist.

Spam is probably the greatest annoyance of the computer age. These unwanted e-mails take up space, consume time and are often explicit or merely offensive. Our biggest corporations work constantly to develop anti-spam technology, but so far, their efforts have flaws that make it preferable to just deal with the span. Even the government has gotten into the act, passing anti-spam legislation that anonymous spammers cheerfully ignore.

Fittingly, it may be a child that shall lead them. Jerry Guo, 16, of Greer, S.C., has created a program to reduce unwanted e-mails. Guo’s novel approach uses an advanced Bayesian statistical method to develop a more adaptive and accurate filter. His anti-spam program is more than 99 percent effective, far exceeding current systems that are not only inaccurate, but also delete legitimate e-mail in the process. For his efforts, Guo has been named a 2004 Davidson Fellow in the technology category, which includes a $50,000 scholarship award.

A Personal Problem
Guo got the idea to develop his anti-spam program not because he was looking for some big money, but because of his own personal experience as a computer user. “About two years ago, I started getting a ridiculous amount of junk mail,” he says. “I tried using an anti-spam program, but it deleted a lot of legitimate e-mail, as well."

Looking at what was available on the market, Guo discovered that most anti-spam programs had the same problems. “All these filters have a one-size-fits-all mode," he says. "I thought, why not make it so the user can personalize the program? In effect, the user would tell the computer what is and isn’t junk mail. After all, what is junk mail to one person may be something important to another. If you could train the filter and adapt it to your personal characteristics, that would eliminate a lot of the variations in commercially available programs.”

Guo’s invention is not available commercially, because it’s more an algorithm rather than a commercial program, but it provides a precise set of guidelines specifying how this program could be created. As for marketing the idea, Guo says he’s “pretty fried” from the several years it’s taken him to work on this project, but he wouldn’t rule out something in the future if it became a possibility.

The Computer Age
To anyone who has a teenager, Guo’s amazing story probably comes as no surprise whatsoever. While to most grownups the computer is a means of facilitating work and family-related information, to teens it’s all communication all the time. Instead of talking on the phone, teens “chat” via instant messaging services such as AIM and Yahoo Messenger. They send e-mails instead of passing notes in class. They swap music files (illegal or not, they still do it). They create “blogs” and Xangas, both of which are types of online journals, where they share their thoughts, favorite pictures and clips of their favorite songs.

In Guo’s case, his introduction to computers came from the technical side, as well as the entertainment/social side. A few years ago, his mom, Rong Guo, was working on her computer science degree. Guo would tag along as she studied and went to classes, reading her books and helping her with her homework. This led to an interest in computers that went beyond the typical teen. He began “fiddling around with computers,” as he puts it, and eventually took an advanced placement course in computer science and statistics. These courses led to his “Eureka” moment.

“I thought, why not combine these two disciplines," says Guo. “This led to approaching spam from a different technical perspective.”

Guo cheerfully admits he’s a “science nerd,” but he comes by his intelligence and interest in science honestly. In addition to his mom’s example of computer literacy, his dad, Chuanpu Guo, is a research scientist. The family moved to Texas from China when Jerry was just 6 years old. Since then, Guo says they’ve moved around a lot, settling in South Carolina two years ago. Unlike many teens, who are usually not very adaptable, Guo doesn’t seem to mind the moves.

In addition to his academic interests in science and research, he is on the tennis team, involved in debating and plays the violin as part of the Carolina Youth Symphony. He also founded ScienceHelp, a nonprofit organization that helps kids complete science projects and encourages disadvantaged youths to pursue careers in the sciences.

Computing a Future
Surprisingly, Guo not only isn’t sure what he wants to do when he grows up, he’s pretty sure whatever he does won’t be in the field of technology. At this point, he’s just focusing on school and on being a teenager, but he thinks he might be interested in the medical field down the road. “I don’t really foresee myself as becoming a programmer,” he says. “I worked at the California Institute of Technology all summer doing molecular biology research, and I think that’s very interesting, more so than computer programming.”

For now, Guo will be focusing on his senior year at Riverside High School and thinking about what he wants to do next. The scholarship, he admits, will help a lot, but a more immediate gratification is just getting rid of all that junk mail.

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  About the Author: Kelly Burgess is a senior contributing writer for iParenting Media.