"It's a bit like the Champions League in football," said Peter Dröll from the Research and Innovation Department of the European Commission, which established the annual EUCYS competition 27 years ago.

"You have national competitions. You identify the best. And you bring them together. Not only to compete with their ideas, but also to share ideas and bring the knowledge further – to further the frontiers of knowledge," he told DW.

"It started as a private prize from Phillips, but we then saw that it had a strong European dimension."

A total of 169 participants - all of them under 20 - hailing from 39 countries in Europe and beyond, set up stalls in the Fabricca del Vapore, a disused train factory beautifully renovated as an arts centre.

From Vivaldi to MIDI

"I'll play you a piece of music, Vivaldi for example," said 19-year old Nadav Shalev from a town near Haifa in Israel, demonstrating his ImproApp - an application that transforms live music into sheet music - by playing Vivaldi on his violin.

The computer immediately started playing a MIDI piano version, and the same phrase appeared on a musical scale on the screen.

"As you hear it is almost the same as I played it. We still don't have one hundred percent accuracy but we're very close to it," Nadav told DW.

"The app is useful, for example, if you have a musical idea and you want to write it. If you hear music like on the radio or in a concert and you want to get the notes, if you improvise and play what you want, and afterwards want to play it again. It's also good for teaching - I'm a violin teacher myself and I use it with my students."

i-Bin - the bin that sorts waste for you

Nadal's field is computing, but a few metres away - in the environment section - I came across Alessandro Carba and Davide Carboni, two students from Ancona in Italy, with what they call an i-Bin. It's a recycling bin that sorts the waste for you. They explained how it works.

"You put the waste inside, and when the lid is closed, the sensor starts the analysis of the waste. The microcontroller allows the movement of all parts of the bin, and then writes the type of waste you have put inside and so the bin says 'paper' - 'plastic' - 'glass'."

And work it did, although it takes the machine - which looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2D2 - a few seconds to identify each piece of waste. This, of course, is just a prototype.

Cash prizes and prestigious internships

It clearly impressed the judges however - Davide and Alessandro were later rewarded with a one-week internship at Italy's Bruno Kessler foundation, one of the many organisations which support the EUCYS competition with internships, study trips and cash prizes for some of Europe's best and brightest young scientists.

Indeed rubbing shoulders and exchanging tips with other young scientists was one of the added attractions of attending EUCYS for the participants, who had all won national science contests in their home countries.

"It's very fascinating to get to know other people from all over the world, and what the others are interested in," said 19-year-old Hungarian science student Szilvia Kiraly, who's working on building blood vessel-like structures, using stem cells.

"It's great to hear what their project is about, how they got here, and what they achieved," she added.

There were a huge number of prizes awarded to the contestants. The three first prizes, however, were awarded to Sanath Kumar Devalapurkar from the USA for his project "On the Stability and Algebraicity of Algebraic K-theory", Michał Bączyk and Paweł Piotr Czyż from Poland for "The studies of behaviour of single and coupled on-off type oscillators on the example of bottle oscillators" and Lukas Stockner from Germany for "Statistical Modelling of Volume-Scattered Light".

Heavy stuff. But child's play for these budding Einsteins and Edisons.