This November 28, 2023 article by Philip Drost for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) The Current radio programme highl8ights two youthful inventors, Note: Links have been removed,
Anush Mutyala [emphasis mine] may only be in Grade 12, but he already has hopes that his innovations and inventions will rival that of Elon Musk.
“I always tell my friends something that would be funny is if I’m competing head-to-head with Elon Musk in the race to getting people [neural] implants,” Mutyala told Matt Galloway on The Current.
Mutyala, a student at Chinguacousy Secondary School in Brampton, Ont., created a brain imaging system that he says opens the future for permanent wireless neural implants.
For his work, he received an award from Youth Science Canada at the National Fair in 2023, which highlights young people pushing innovation.
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Mutyala wanted to create a way for neural implants to last longer. Implants can help people hear better, or move parts of the body they otherwise couldn’t, but neural implants in particular face issues with regard to power consumption, and traditionally must be replaced by surgery after their batteries die. That can be every five years.
But Mutyala thinks his system, Enerspike, can change that. The algorithm he designed lowers the energy consumption needed for implants to process and translate brain signals into making a limb move.
“You would essentially never need to replace wireless implants again for the purpose of battery replacement,” said Mutyala.
Mutyala was inspired by Stephen Hawking, who famously spoke with the use of a speech synthesizer.
“What if we used technology like this and we were able to restore his complete communication ability? He would have been able to communicate at a much faster rate and he would have had a much greater impact on society,” said Mutyala.
… Mutyala isn’t the only innovator. Vinny Gu [emphasis mine], a Grade 11 student at Markville Secondary School in Markham, Ont., also received an award for creating DermaScan, an online application that can look at a photo and predict whether the person photographed has skin cancer or not.
“There has [sic] been some attempts at this problem in the past. However, they usually result in very low accuracy. However, I incorporated a technology to help my model better detect the minor small details in the image in order for it to get a better prediction,” said Gu.
He says it doesn’t replace visiting a dermatologist — but it can give people an option to do pre-screenings with ease, which can help them decide if they need to go see a dermatologist. He says his model is 90-per-cent accurate.
He is currently testing Dermascan, and he hopes to one day make it available for free to anyone who needs it.
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Drost’s November 28, 2023 article hosts an embedded audio file of the radio interview and more.
You can find out about Anoush Mutyala and his work on his LinkedIn profile (in a addition to being a high school student, since October 2023, he’s also a neuromorphics researcher at York University). If my link to his profile fails, search Mutyala’s name online and access his public page at the LinkedIn website. There’s something else, Mutyala has an eponymous website.
My online searches for more about Vinny (or Vincent) Gu were not successful.
You can find a bit more information about Mutyala’s Enerspike here and Gu’s DermaScan here. Youth Science Canada can be found here.
Not to forget, there’s grade nine student Arushi Nath and her work on planetary defence, which is being recognized in a number of ways. (See my November 17, 2023 posting, Arushi Nath gives the inside story about the 2023 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Awards and my November 23, 2023 posting, Margot Lee Shetterly [Hidden Figures author] in Toronto, Canada and a little more STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] information.) I must say November 2023 has been quite the banner month for youth science in Canada.