During IBM Interconnect 2017 this week, “The Cognitive Story,” a project that partners IBM Corp. with the Darwin Ecosystem, LLC, held a presentation on their research.  The compelling story is about a 29-year-old woman who suffers from Rhett’s Syndrome, a rare disease that mainly affects women.

In her condition, she is an advanced quadriplegic without the ability to communicate. She still has an active mind, and this is why three men have set out to give her a voice through artificial intelligence.

The story is about a remarkable collaboration between three people. One of those people is 13-year-old Tanmay Bakshi (pictured), developer, algorithmist and IBM champion for cloud, who is contributing to the project using his unique talents.

“We are basically taking these cognitive services and allowing people who don’t have the natural ability to express themselves or communicate in any way, to be able to … communicate their decisions, communicate their emotions … through this cognitive system. That’s why it’s so interesting, because imagine if you can’t talk .. .you are quite literally trapped in your own body,” said Bakshi.

Bakshi recently joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during IBM InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada, to talk a bit about the project that he would be presenting at the event. (*Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE features Tanmay Bakshi as its Guest of the Week.

The youngest IBM Watson cognitive platform programmer began coding at the age of five. His focus is shifting to cognitive technologies, such as AI and neural networks, the technology that model the human brain and nervous system.

“Mainly… you could say now my real focus is how we can use artificial intelligence and cognitive computing in order to amplify and augment human capability. And, of course, how we can use it to change people’s lives in a positive way,” said Bakshi.

Using cognitive technologies to improve lives

Teaming up with Tim Duncan, innovation engineer, IBM Cloud, and Thierry Hubert, technologist and innovator at Darwin Ecosystem LLC, to work on “The Cognitive Story,” the 13-year-old is engineering his own custom implementations of neural networks.

“’The Cognitive Story’ is powered by my own custom-coded neural networks. And that’s why I have been given the designation of algorithmist, because I love to work with algorithms, finetune them and, of course, design them,” Bakshi explained.

The woman highlighted in the project is named Boo (after a sound her parents detected when she was a baby). The team is using an electroencephalogram and artificial intelligence to associate and correspond with Boo’s brainwave patterns. The goal is to have IBM Watson learn the patterns through machine learning, interpret what Boo needs and express them through a tablet device.

Not Rocket Science Inc. is also a part of the project, and its role will be to take the lessons learned in this study and apply them to other cases. The completion of “The Cognitive Story” may not happen until Bakshi is 15; however, the teen has plenty to keep him busy.

Bakshi developed AskTanmay, the world’s first web-based Natural Language Question Answering System to be powered by IBM Watson’s cognitive capabilities and built in Swift, Java and Python.

“I’ve been working more with AskTamnay, and in fact in June at Developer Connective last year, I actually open sourced [the platform]. Since it’s open source, I love to share my knowledge with this code,” he said.

Through his YouTube channel and work with youth organizations, Bakshi is on a mission to influence at least 100,000  kids to learn how to code. He recently released his book, “Hello Swift!: IOS Programming for Kids and Other Beginners,” so he may reach his goal quickly.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. (*Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE is a media partner at InterConnect. Neither IBM nor other conference sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE