After having recently got two Indian-origin CEOs, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Dhivya Suryadevara, America selected the top winner of Regeneron Science Talent Search 2024 from the Indian immigrants community. 17-year-old Achyuta Rajaram from New Hampshire won America’s Junior Nobel (as the STEM competition is popularly known) and bagged a whopping cash prize $250,000 as the most promising scientist of tomorrow. This is the second consecutive win for Indian Diaspora in the United States after Neel Moudgal from Michigan emerged the top winner in the same competition in 2023.
Achyuta Rajaram, a high schooler with dreamy eyes and unkempt hair, has been awarded as the first place winner for developing an automatic method to identify which parts of a computer model are responsible for ‘thinking’ and ‘decision making’ when it comes to interpreting images. In machine learning and artificial intelligence, the algorithms of a computer model work by certain patterns in data to respond to queries. His thought-provoking research can be likened to a deep dive into the human thought process, understanding which neurons in the brain respond to stimuli in the form of a picture.
“Achyuta’s research improved our ability to discover what computer models ‘think’ when they analyze a photo and which parts of their ‘mechanical brains’ are contributing to the decision making. For example, when a model identifies a car in a photo, does it first identify wheels and use this to identify ‘car-ness,’ or does it look for something else?” notes Society for Science, an American nonprofit that promotes STEM education programs and competitions. His project could help make computational algorithms “more effective, fair and safe”.
Indian American Achyuta Rajaram attributes his interest in computer science and coding to his parents, Nivedita Chevvakula and Rajaram Ramaswamy Kumaraswamy, who gave him an exposure to emerging technologies from a young age. Jazz drumming, teaching chess strategy, and organizing in-house tournaments are among his favorite activities beyond computers. He co-heads the physics, chemistry and chess clubs at Phillips Exeter Academy. After graduation, he plans to major in computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and continue his research in Artificial Intelligence.
Arnav Chakravarthy among top 10 winners at 2024 Regeneron Science Talent Search
The other Indian-origin teen honored at the 2024 Regeneron Science Talent Search is Arnav Chakravarty from Sunnyvale, California. 18-year-old Arnav made it to the top 10 winners and took home $50,000 cash prize for his research that may help improve therapies for age-related human diseases like Alzheimer’s. He intensively studied how certain immune system cells known as macrophages regenerate themselves in an ageing body. Arnav Chakravarty’s research is based on recent studies that discovered that macrophage cells may be replenished by the bone marrow in aging humans
Interestingly, Arnav is cofounder and CEO of SciLynk Inc., an AI-driven startup for scientists and researchers. Nasdaq’s Entrepreneurial Center selected him as a ‘Face of Entrepreneurship’ in 2021 out of 30,000 young entrepreneurs across the globe. At the same time, he is interning at Stanford Medicine where he is leading a cancer research project. He is also the state secretary of the California Future Business Leaders of America, according to Society for Science.
