U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday praised the work of a budding Indian American teenage scientist who used machine learning to teach a computer to identify potential drugs for cancer, tuberculosis and Ebola.
Anvita Gupta, 17, of Scottsdale, Arizona, winner of Third Place Medal of Distinction for Global Good, was one of the participants of the fifth White House Science Fair which was attended by several other Indian-origin teenagers — Trisha Prabhu from Illinois, Sahil Doshi from Pittsburgh, Nikhil Behari from Pennsylvania and Ruchi Pandya from San Jose.
When Gupta explained how she had used an algorithm to help identify possible new drugs to treat Ebola, cancer and tuberculosis, Mr. Obama turned to the press, grinned and said, “I don’t know what you all have been doing. But this is what she has been doing.” “It is unbelievable what so many of these young people have accomplished at such an early age,” Mr. Obama said.
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