Six Indian-origin kids reach the finals of Google Science Fair

Young Indian minds will be competing at the finals of the Google Science Fair this year. The Sixth edition the yearly online science competition in which teens in the age-group of 13 to 18 compete has two Indians and four Indian origin teens among it's finalists this year. The six will be competing with ten others for the final prize of  USD 50,000 scholarship. The two Indians selected for finals are 15-year-old Mansha Fatima from Hyderabad and Shriank K from Bangalore.

The four Indian-American finalists comprise of Anika Cheerla (14), Anushka Naiknaware (13), Nikhil Gopal (15) and Nishita Belur (13).

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Fatima is a student of Sadhu Vaswani International School, who has created a control system to offer automatic water management system that operates the functioning of the gates at the main reservoir and the supply of water at the field irrigation canals. On the other hand, Shriank, who is currently in 10^th standard studying in National Public School, invented a wearable device called KeepTab which does not let you forget which thing is kept where. It uses a cloud-based deep-learning framework to aid human-memory to recall the location of their day-to-day objects. He was also a finalist at the FIRST LEGO League World Championships in 2012, as reported by NDTV.

From the Indian-American group, Cheerla based in California has been chosen for her project- ‘Automated Prediction of Future Breast Cancer Occurrence from Non-Cancerous Mammograms’.

Nainknaware from Portland, Oregaon has been selected for, 'Fractal Inspired Chitosan and Carbon Nanoparticle Based Biocompatible Sensor for Wound Management.' Gopal from New Jersey has been finalised for his project- ‘Point of Care Testing for Malaria Using a Smartphone and Microfluidic ELISA.' And lastly, Belur from California again was selected on the basis of her project about detection of metal surface defects using laser light reflection.

Even the Community Impact Award Winner was also an Indian- Advay Ramesh. He had designed a hand held terminal (Fish Ermen Lifeline Terminal (FELT)) for better safety of the fishermen and their productivity using the Standard Position Services (SPS).

Shobhita Sundaram, Aswath Suryanarayanan, Seerat Kaur, Siddharth Pullabhatla, Shreyas Kapur, Shivam Singh, Ayush Panda, Tejit Pabari, and Tanmay Vadhera were some of the regional finalists from India.

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Point to be noted, there are more than enough girls on this list to dissuade any notion that females are any less interested in science and technology than boys.

The names of the winners will be announced in the last week of September. Watch this space to know more.

Feature Image Credit: NewIndianexpress.com