Folks say computers are a young person’s game, and one of the best examples is Tanmay Bakshi (pictured), algorithmist and cognitive developer. Thirteen years old, going on 14, he represents the energy and innovation of young coders. Some of the biggest companies in the industry have offered the enthusiastic Bakshi a seat at the table.

When asked about the coolest thing he’s working on, Bakshi replied: “It would have to be a tie between AskTanmay, DeepSPADE and advancements with the cognitive story.” Bakshi is an Honorary Cloud Advisor with IBM Corp.

During this week’s Open Source Summit conference in Los Angeles, Bakshi spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio. They discussed machine learning, his keynote speech at the event and his current projects.

Proving the impact of machine learning

One interesting project Bakshi is working on concerns spam detection in Stack Overflow, a popular tech library and community. With help from a group of programmers, known as Charcoal-SE, the young genius has brought machine learning in to identify possible spam messages. The idea is to train machine learning on context and word patterns to flag possible spam posts, Bakshi explained.

During the event, Bakshi also will give a keynote speech to help inspire young coders. Among other topics, he plans to focus on DeepSPADE and AskTanmay, as well as discuss how coding work through machine learning impacts many fields, including healthcare, utilities and security.

“I have a goal that’s really to reach out and help 100,000 aspiring coders,” Bakshi said.

AskTanmay is something of a personal project for Bakshi. A revival of an older project, AskMSR, the system is designed to answer questions by researching the web. AskTanmay relies on redundancy in its research to deliver correct answers. Recent efforts, however, have reduced the need for redundancy and improved the system’s ability to understand the content it searches, Bakshi stated.

If this seems like a bit of a whirlwind for a young coder, that may be true. However, Bakshi is happy to have the opportunity to work with so many different tools, including open source.

“Everything I’ve been able to create […] now integrates Keras [neural network library] and TensorFlow [machine intelligence software library]. I’ve been able to venture into lots of different APIs as well,” Bakshi concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Open Source Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Open Source Summit 2017. Neither The Linux Foundation nor Red Hat Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE