A 15-year old student and young scientist has just become the first recipient of Time’s Kid of the Year.
Gitanjali Rao is a sophomore at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado, and used artificial intelligence and created apps to target problems such as: cyberbullying, opioid addiction and contaminated drinking water.
Introducing the first-ever Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao https://t.co/Hvgu3GLoNs pic.twitter.com/4zORbRiGMU
— TIME (@TIME) December 3, 2020
Rao was lucky enough to be interviewed by Academy-Award winner and activist Angelina Jolie. During the interview they discussed how Rao is not your typical scientist.
“I don’t look like your typical scientist. Everything I see on TV is that it’s an older, usually white man as a scientist. It’s weird to me that it was almost like people had assigned roles, regarding like their gender, their age, the colour of their skin,” Rao told Jolie.
“Because, from personal experience, it’s not easy when you don’t see anyone else like you. So I really want to put out that message: If I can do it, you can do it, and anyone can do it.”
One of Rao’s inventions is an app and a chrome extension called Kindly, which uses artificial intelligence to detect cyberbullying at an early stage. It works by letting a person type in a word or phrase, and the algorithm picks up whether it may be interpreted as bullying. It then gives you the opportunity to edit it or send it as it is, allowing you rethink what you’re saying.
“I put out a survey to parents, teachers and students, and I honestly expected that students don’t want to be micromanaged,” Rao said.
“But a lot of the teenagers were telling me that, you know, it doesn’t seem like I’m being micromanaged; it seems like I’m being given an opportunity to learn from my mistakes. So that’s what I was super excited about, that they understood what the goal of it was.”
What a queen.
You can read the full interview here.
