Amid the chilly winter season, TEDx Chandigarh organized a pre-event on 29 December, 2017 hosting two brilliant minds from North America. The event drew a crowd of intellectual minds that parleyed with the experts in the field of finance and technology. The first speaker was Harjit Singh, who is an investment banker in the city of New York while the second one was Tanmay Bakshi, who is the youngest developer at IBM Watson and resides in Canada. Tanmay Bakshi, the 14 year old child prodigy opened up about his journey so far as an algorithmist and provided the audience with fruitful insights on Artificial Intelligence. Giving his own example, the young genius swore by the benefits of enrolling the child into coding at an elementary stage and applauded the efforts of programs developed for this purpose such as Scratch. Tanmay also spoke about the concept of cryptocurrency and Bitcoins in particular. He felt optimistic about blockchain technology and pointed out at the mistake people do by interchanging the term with artificial intelligence. Tanmay felt that there exists a gap in the correct utilization of AI, which can be bridged only if the quality of communication between the developers of technology and decision makers is augmented through collaboration. In this manner, artificial intelligence can be implemented constructively to combat with those who employ it for the wrong purpose. As far as the future is concerned, he as a developer believes in trial and error method for innovation. According to Tanmay, there is no shortcut in this domain and you have to keep on trying unless novelty is achieved. At the end, he gave a small piece of advice saying that there is a need for better understanding on the concept of artificial intelligence. A hue and cry has been created over it primarily because people do not know what it actually is. Organizations need to hire individuals for jobs that require them and use AI to make their tasks simpler and more efficient. Start with the basics, he said, by learning Python and then progress on to the technicalities. On being asked about the person he takes inspiration from, Tanmay was quick to respond. His father got him into the field when he was 5 years old and motivated him to develop his first app at the age of 9. He has grown up watching his father program and looks up to him every single day. Tanmay also gets inspired by Elon Musk and highly admires Tesla’s Autopilot model.
