The Spirit of Ramanujan grant is an annual prize awarded by the University of Virginia and Templeton World Charity organisation to high school students.
Delhi teenager Navvye Anand has won the prestigious Spirit of Ramanujan grant for 2023 for his project to revive an endangered Indian language using artificial intelligence (AI).
Navvye Anand has been granted $4800 (approximately ₹4 lakh) to attend the Wolfram high school research programme, that has an acceptance rate of about 11%. (HT Photo)
The 16-year-old, a class 11 student at Sanskriti School, got a mail about receiving the award on March 17 for his research project titled Cross-Lingual Automatic Speech Recognition for Endangered Languages, which brought together his passion for mathematics and love of languages.
The Spirit of Ramanujan grant is an annual prize awarded by the University of Virginia and Templeton World Charity organisation to high school students to recognise talent in mathematics and the sciences.
As part of the award, Anand has been granted $4800 (approximately ₹4 lakh) to attend the Wolfram high school research programme, that has an acceptance rate of about 11%. According to the letter received announcing the award grant, a major chunk of the award — $3800 — will go towards the tuition fee of the programme, while he will use a further $1000 to support his participation in the Euler Circle programme (for advanced mathematics) later in 2023.
Speaking about his project, Anand said he visited Palampur, Himachal Pradesh in 2018 and 2019, and fell in love with the beauty of the Kangri language and the warmth of people there. He said he decided that he wanted to work towards preserving the language, which currently has only around 1.2 million speakers.
He started working with linguists and translators to include Kangri in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software using AI in June 2022.
This was where his mathematical genius played a role. Using AI, he plans to use cross-lingual referencing so that he can borrow references from resource-rich languages such as Hindi and use pattern recognition to make transcribing easier for Kangri.
“Kangri is spoken mostly in Himachal Pradesh and also some parts of Punjab. It is spoken by about 1.2 million people and is listed as one of the 10 endangered Indian languages by UNESCO. A major challenge in transcribing Kangri and other such languages is the dearth of recorded literature in these languages,” said Anand.
He said about two-thirds of the work is done as the auditory data has been collected and sorted, and he is running initial tests. He said he will be able to finish the project by June after the finetuning process is complete.
Eventually, he said, he plans to include other endangered languages in ASR as well.
“Through my work in the field of Computational Linguistics, I wish to optimise the process of cross-lingual recognition, and subsequently use the power of patterns to preserve endangered languages across the world,” he said. Through his research, he said he hoped to develop algorithms and models that could help document the language and make a significant impact on the preservation of linguistic and cultural diversity.
According to Anand, his love for mathematics began at a young age, when he started exploring number theory and won a national competition for it. He was also selected in March for the Polymath Junior Research Experience for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.
Apart from number theory, Anand loves reading about chaos theory and graph theory and intends to pursue a career in mathematics. He is currently a teaching assistant for the New York Math Circle.
The Spirit of Ramanujan STEM Talent Initiative was founded by Ken Ono, vice president of the American Mathematical Society to support students through financial grants and mentorship opportunities. It is given to about 15-30 students every year and applications for 2023 are still being accepted till April 30.
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