In a proud moment for Assam and the entire Northeast, 16-year-old Huma Abia Kanta, a Grade XII student of Royal Global School, Guwahati, has presented her research paper at the Advancement and Innovation: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning I International Scientific-Practical Conference.
The event was held from October 30–31, 2025, in hybrid format at Nakhchivan State University, Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan, and organized by Azerbaijan Technical University in collaboration with Nakhchivan State University (Azerbaijan), Tashkent State Technical University (Uzbekistan), Asia Pacific University (Malaysia), and Mingachevir State University (Azerbaijan).
Her paper, titled “ML-Based Prediction of Phycocyanin Purity,” explored how machine-learning models can predict pigment purity levels critical to sustainable bioresource industries. By comparing six regressors — Linear, Ridge, SVR, Random Forest, and XGBoost — her model achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.058, substantially outperforming the standard lab standard deviation of 0.31.
Huma’s participation makes her one of the youngest Indians to present a research paper at an international AI and ML forum.
As per the conference’s publishing policy, her paper will be published in reputed international journals indexed in Scopus.
She has also authored another research paper, “Seq2Seq Reconstruction of Sanskrit Phonology via Tang-Era Siddhaṃ-Hanzi Transliteration: A Buddhist-Lexicon-Inspired Encoder–Decoder Model with Luong Attention,” which has been accepted for presentation at RegICON 2025, the Regional International Conference on Natural Language Processing jointly organized by Gauhati University and Assam Skill University, to be held later this month.
At just 16, Huma has already co-authored three additional research papers currently under peer review.
Huma is also the Founder and Lead Developer of desicodes, an educational startup developing asPy, an Assamese-Python transpiler aimed at enabling coding in local languages to democratize computer science learning in the Northeast. She has worked closely with Dr. Purnima Devi Barman’s Hargila Army, helping digitize motifs of the endangered Greater Adjutant Stork for women-woven handloom saris — a unique blend of ecology, technology, and culture.
Expressing gratitude, Huma said, “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.”
Royal Global School is among Northeast India’s leading CBSE institutions emphasizing academic excellence, innovation, and values-based education — nurturing young minds to think globally and act locally.
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