Born in Delhi on October 16th, 2003, Tanmay Bakshi is a Canadian teenager computer scientist.
What you are feeling, is exactly what I felt when I was writing this article. Trust me; this boy has some serious talent which I took the initiative to jot down in this “Life Journey” article.
Besides being a computer scientist, he is a renowned technology author, machine learning system architect, YouTuber, TED Speaker, Google Developer Expert for machine learning, Media Personality, and Keynote Speaker. Like it wasn’t enough, he is an algorithmist too.
As far as his passion is concerned, he is more devoted towards developing algorithms, architecting machine learning solutions, teaching STEM fields, and researching. The bottom line is; he is sharing what he knows with the world and that’s for good.
The Rise of “Not” an Average Teenager
Though he first caught the attention of IBM at the age of 11, Bakshi’s rise in the tech industry took turn much earlier. While other children were getting a hold of lego sets and playing in gardens, the five-year-old Tanmay Bakshi was learning how to code.
When it comes down to his family, his father was a computer programmer for a number of years. Now, that justifies the young Bakshi’s interest in typing codes.
Acknowledging his son’s curiosity, Puneet Bakshi decided to teach Tanmay how to program. From there onwards, Bakshi began using the internet on his own and reading books on programming.
At the age of seven, Tanmay decided to set up a YouTube channel where posted tutorials on coding and web development. With each new video, he received thousands of questions from people all across the globe.
At the age of eight, he taught himself how to develop iOS apps. And by the age of nine, he had made his first app, which teaches multiplication, accepted into the Apple Store.
With time he lost interest in programming, and by the age of 11, everything around took a new turn. While uploading a video on YouTube, he came across a documentary on the “question answering” machine IBM Watson and how it played Jeopardy.
Within a week, he ended up making his own Watson app. He named the app, “Ask Tanmay”. The app will respond back to questions asked by looking up to the best possible answers.
Shortly thereafter, he stumbled upon an IBM service called Document Conversion, which was in alpha at the time. The main objective of the program was to convert documents from one format, such as a PDF, to another format like HTML.
Just minutes into the software, he discovered a bug. He posted what he found on a programming website and on his personal Twitter.
What sets him apart is the fact that he is a recipient of various prestigious awards like the Global Goodwill Ambassador at LinkedIn, Twilio Doer Award, and Knowledge Ambassador Award.
In his quest of training 100,000 aspiring developers, he has trained more than 7,500 to create their own solutions. What’s fascinating is that all of this has been done while finding time to work on the following two projects of his own.
While the first one is focused onhelping the ones with Rett Syndrome so they could “speak” through the detection and interpretation of EEG signals and the other one is dedicated to suicide prevention through depression mitigation using AI.
