15-year-old Reshma Kosaraju is from Saratoga, California, USA. When she first moved to San Francisco in 2018, smoke and pollution from a forest fire 320 km away made breathing dangerous. It was so bad that she had to wear a mask for over a month! Firefighters put out the blaze, and the air eventually cleared, but it got Reshma thinking about how long until there's another one.
THE IDEA!
Reshma says that she wanted to figure out a way to predict forest fires before they occurred, and she hoped that this could save lives, money, and our environment. Back then, she only had a vague idea about how artificial intelligence (AI) worked, but she gradually taught herself everything she needed to know using online resources. She then gathered information about the weather and climate from automatic weather stations situated around the USA.
Next, Reshma combined meteorological (weather) data such as temperature, wind speed, and humidity with info about human behavior to create an artificial intelligence system that could predict forest fires with almost 90% accuracy!
SUCCESS!
Amazingly, Rehsma's 'early warning system' is now being used by firefighters in California! With her AI, they're able to predict where and when forest fires will occur. They can respond to fires more quickly, save more lives, and reduce the amount of toxic smoke produced by each blaze. Wow! So what now?
Reshma excitedly explains that she believes making it into an app would be the next step, allowing everyone to access it and potentially making it useful worldwide. She expresses her happiness at having won the Children's Climate Prize!
WHAT THE JUDGES SAID
Reshma is brave, innovative, and solution-focused. She has created an extraordinary and creative solution to a huge human problem, with the potential to save lives all over the globe.
App to identify waste for Recycling!
"Waste mistakes are a big problem", says 17-year-old Yash Narayan from San Carlos, USA. He says that he was shocked when he went to a local recycling center and saw how many recyclable and compostable materials were in the landfill pile, like plastic and food waste. People really don't know what they can recycle. Of the 2 billion tonnes of waste, people generate each year, only around 15% is recycled.
A BETTER WAY
After recognizing the problem, Yash realized there had to be a simple, accurate, and affordable way for people to access the right information exactly when they needed it. This led him to develop DeepWaste, a smartphone app that helps users determine whether an item is recyclable. All users have to do is point their phone’s camera at a piece of waste — the app, powered by artificial intelligence, identifies the material and tells them which bin it belongs in. It's that easy!
Meanwhile, AI-driven recycling robots are also working behind the scenes, efficiently separating plastics, glass, and metals.
Yash shares that people became 50% more accurate at sorting their waste correctly when using DeepWaste — proving that he certainly hasn't been wasting his time!
To learn more or to download the app, visit deepwaste.ai. Every time users upload images of waste, they help train the AI model, making the system even smarter and more precise.