Sagnik Anupam and Tanish Goel of DPS RK Puram have been awarded the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar 2020 .As a part of the award, they have received a certificate, a citation, a cash award of Rs. 1,00,000, and a tablet. They received the award from the Honourable President of India at a ceremony at the Darbar Hall of Rashtrapati Bhavan on 22 January 2020. They were also felicitated by the Honorable Prime Minister of India at his residence at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg, and interacted with the Honorable Minister of Women and Child Development. They were also a part of the Republic Day parade on 26 January 2020 in New Delhi.
Sagnik Anupam has got the award for developing a machine-learning model that can predict water levels up to four days in advance for the Brahmani-Baitarani river basin in Odisha. For his project, he used rainfall and river discharge data from the past 40 years to train his model to predict water levels and created a cloud-computing based web app to run simulations. Combining data from satellite images and other sources, he has developed a sub-district level flood vulnerability index to help early evacuation. His early-warning system is highly generalizable and can also be used on other river systems to help flood-prone areas around the world. Recognizing his contributions to science, he has been selected as a member of the Junior Academy of the highly-acclaimed New York Academy of Sciences. Sagnik has also won laurels for India at many different international and national competitions. He was a part of the contingent for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2018, held at Pittsburgh, USA. As a part of a team, he has also won a First Award in the Grade 11 Large Team category of the NASA Ames Space Settlement Design Contest 2018 and was a finalist at the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge 2017, held at Orlando, USA. He was also a member of India’s first team to compete at the International Youth Physicists’ Tournament, held in Beijing, China, in 2018
Tanish was awarded the Bal Shakti Puraskar in the category of innovation .He was recognized for creating a machine learning algorithm which autonomously detected emotions based on facial expressions and speech with a team of college students in a research internship (The only high school student out of 350 college students); for winning the NASA Goddard award at the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge, with a team of 3 . He became a junior member at the New York Academy of Sciences, where he worked on a Lunar Space Settlement project with a global team (6 members from 4 countries and 5 cities).
We wish both Anupam and Tanish the best in all future endeavours and may they scale even greater heights in the years to come.
