In a remarkable achievement for Assam and the entire Northeast region, 16-year-old Huma Abia Kanta, a Grade XII student from Royal Global School in Guwahati, has presented her research paper at the prestigious “Advancement and Innovation: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning” International Scientific-Practical Conference. The conference took place in a hybrid format from October 30 to 31, 2025, at Nakhchivan State University in Azerbaijan, organized by Azerbaijan Technical University alongside several international partner universities.
Huma’s paper, titled “ML-Based Prediction of Phycocyanin Purity,” delves into the use of machine-learning models to predict pigment purity levels crucial for sustainable bio-resource industries. By evaluating six different regressors, her model achieved a mean absolute error of 0.058, significantly better than the standard laboratory deviation of 0.31. This accomplishment places her among the youngest Indians to present at such an esteemed AI and ML forum. Her paper is set to be published in renowned international journals indexed in Scopus.
In addition to this achievement, Huma has authored another paper, “Seq2Seq Reconstruction of Sanskrit Phonology via Tang-Era SiddhaC-Hanzi Transliteration,” which has been accepted for presentation at RegICON 2025, a regional conference on natural language processing. At just 16, she has co-authored three other research papers currently under peer review.
Huma is also the founder and lead developer of “desicodes,” an educational startup focused on creating asPy, an Assamese-Python transpiler designed to make computer science education more accessible in local languages. She has collaborated with Dr. Pumima Devi Barman’s “Hargila Army” to digitize motifs of the endangered Greater Adjutant Stork for traditional handloom saris, merging ecology, technology, and culture.
Expressing her gratitude, Huma credits her mentor, Dr. Ankur Pan Saikia, and Dr. Arup Kr Mukhopadhyay, Director of Royal Global School, for their unwavering support. Royal Global School is renowned in Northeast India for emphasizing academic excellence, innovation, and values-based education, fostering a global mindset in young students.
