A 16-year-old schoolgirl from Assam, Huma Abia Kanta, has made a significant mark in the field of artificial intelligence by presenting her research paper at the “Advancement and Innovation: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning” International Scientific-Practical Conference.
The conference took place on October 30-31, 2025, in a hybrid format at Nakhchivan State University in Azerbaijan. This event was organized by Azerbaijan Technical University in collaboration with partner institutions such as Nakhchivan State University, Tashkent State Technical University in Uzbekistan, Asia Pacific University in Malaysia, and Mingachevir State University in Azerbaijan.
Huma”s paper, titled “ML-Based Prediction of Phycocyanin Purity,” investigates the use of machine learning models to forecast pigment purity levels crucial for sustainable practices in bio-resource industries. Her research compared six regression models: Linear, Ridge, Support Vector Regression (SVR), Random Forest, and XGBoost. Remarkably, her model achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.058, which is significantly better than the standard laboratory deviation of 0.31.
This achievement positions Huma among the youngest Indians to present a paper at an international AI and ML forum. In accordance with the conference”s publishing policy, her work will be published in reputable international journals indexed in Scopus.
Additionally, Huma has another research paper titled “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. This upcoming regional conference on natural language processing will be jointly hosted by Gauhati University and Assam Skill University later this month.
Huma has co-authored three more research papers that are currently under peer review. She is also the founder and lead developer of desicodes, an educational startup that is creating “Py,” an Assamese-Python transpiler aimed at promoting coding in local languages to enhance computer science education in Northeast India.
Her commitment to social impact is evident in her collaboration with Dr Purnima Devi Barman”s “Hargila Army,” where she has contributed to digitizing motifs of the endangered Greater Adjutant Stork for women-woven handloom saris, integrating ecology, technology, and culture.
Expressing her gratitude, Huma stated, “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.”
