Tarun Paparaju : This 17-year-old boy created a machine learning model to suggest potential drugs for Covid-19
The 17-year-old boy loves solving real-world Data Science problems, especially in the areas based on Deep learning: Natural language processing, Signal processing.
keeping with its tradition of high excellence and achievements, Greenwood High International School’s student Tarun Paparaju of Class 12 has achieved the ‘Grand Master’ level in kernels, the highest accreditation in Kaggle, holding a rank of 13 out of 118,024 Kagglers worldwide. Kaggle is the world’s largest online community for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
There are only 20 Kernel Grandmasters out of the three million users on Kaggle worldwide, and Tarun, aged 17 years, is honored to be one of the 20 Kernel Grandmasters now. Users of Kaggle are placed at different levels based on the quality and accuracy of their solutions to real-world artificial intelligence problems. The five levels in ascending order are Novice, Contributor, Expert, Master, and Grandmaster.
Kaggle hosts several data science competitions and contestants are challenged to find solutions to these real-world challenges. Kernels are a medium through which Kagglers share their code and insights on how to solve the problem.
These kernels include in-depth data analysis, visualisation, and machine learning, usually written in Python or R programming language. Other Kagglers can up vote a kernel if they believe it provides useful insights or solves the problem. ‘Kernels Grandmaster’ title at Kaggle requires 15 kernels qualified with gold medals.
Tarun’s passion for Calculus, Mathematical modeling, and Data science from a very young age got him interested in participating and contributing to the Kaggle community.
17-year-old boy loves solving real-world Data Science problems:
He loves solving real-world Data Science problems, especially in the areas based on Deep learning: Natural language processing, Signal processing. Tarun is an open-source contributor to Keras, a Deep learning framework.
He has proposed and added Capsule NN layer support to Keras framework. He writes blogs about his adventures and learnings in data science.
Now, he closely works with the Kaggle community and aspires to be a scholar in the area of Natural language processing. Additionally, he loves playing cricket and football. Sports is a large part of his life outside Data science and academics.
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Commenting on reaching the Grand Master’s level at Kaggle, Tarun Paparaju said:
“I have been working on data science projects on Kaggle for the last 2 years. And recently, I won my 15th gold medal in kernels to become a Kernels Grandmaster. It’s a great feeling to be the youngest Kaggle Grandmaster in the world and achieve a rank of 13 out of 118,024 Kagglers worldwide. It has been a dream for a long time. Sharing solutions and insights about problems that matter is my passion, and Kaggle kernels has been an excellent way to express this passion of mine.”
“One of my favourite Kaggle projects was related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Kaggle provided a large dataset of Covid-19 related research papers and challenged participants to find useful insights on how to control the pandemic. Based on this dataset, I created a machine learning model which suggests potential drugs to consider for Covid-19.”
“I was happy that I could make my small contribution by contributing insights about Covid-19. I published my findings in the form of a detailed kernel at Kaggle, “added Tarun.
Commenting on Tarun’s achievement, Niru Agarwal, Trustee, Greenwood High said:
“We are proud of Tarun’s global achievement at such a young age. It is a testimony to his knowledge and skills as well as to the intellectual freedom that the school encourages. It is a unique achievement as it is not easy to win competitions of high order such as Kaggle. We will promote more such activities at our school and encourage students to participate in them.”
