16-year-old Assam schoolgirl presents research paper at international AI conference

A 16-year-old Assam schoolgirl, Huma Abia Kanta, a Class XII student of Royal Global School, Guwahati, has presented her research paper at the "Advancement and Innovation: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning" International Scientific-Practical Conference.

The event was held on October 30-31 in hybrid format at Nakhchivan State University, Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan, and organised by Azerbaijan Technical University with partner universities including Nakhchivan State University (Azerbaijan), Tashkent State Technical University (Uzbekistan), Asia Pacific University (Malaysia), and Mingachevir State University (Azerbaijan).

Her paper, titled "ML-Based Prediction of Phycocyanin Purity", explored how machine-learning models can predict pigment purity levels critical to sustainable bio-resource industries.

By comparing six regressors — Linear, Ridge, SVR, Random Forest, and XGBoost — her model achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.058, substantially outperforming the standard lab SD of 0.31.

Huma's participation makes her among the youngest Indians to present a paper at an international AI & ML forum. According to the conference's publishing policy, her paper will now be published in reputable international journals indexed in Scopus.

She has also authored another research paper, "Seq2Seq Reconstruction of Sanskrit Phonology via Tang-Era Siddham-Hanzi Transliteration: A Buddhist-Lexicon-Inspired Encoder-Decoder Model with Luong Attention," which has been accepted for presentation at RegICON 2025, the Regional International Conference on Natural Language Processing jointly organised by Gauhati University and Assam Skill University, to be held later this month. Huma has already co-authored three additional research papers, which are currently under peer review.

Huma is the Founder and lead developer of "desicodes", an educational startup building asPy, an Assamese-Python transpiler aimed at enabling coding in local languages to democratise computer science learning in the Northeast.

She has also worked closely with Dr Purnima Devi Barman's "Hargila Army", helping digitise motifs of the endangered Greater Adjutant Stork for women-woven handloom saris — blending ecology, technology, and culture.

Expressing gratitude, Huma said, "I owe this milestone to my mentor, Dr Ankur Pan Saikia, and to Dr Arup Kr. Mukhopadhyay, Director of Royal Global School, for their constant guidance."