WWDC 2020: Apple rewards Delhi student Palash Taneja for his Covid-19 tool

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2020 is going to kick off on June 22 in a whole new virtual format for the first time ever. More than 23 million developers from across the world will be joining in through the Apple Developer App and website to connect, share and create with innovators and entrepreneurs.

There will also be students, all 350 of them selected from across 41 countries and regions, who are the winners of the Swift Student Challenge. Apple’s WWDC Swift Student Challenge is for the next-gen coders and creators and helps pick some of the best ideas that can “shape the future”.

Among this eclectic bunch of students is Delhi boy Palash Taneja.

Taneja, who is 19 right now, has just finished his freshman year at the University of Texas in Austin. Four years ago Taneja contracted a severe case of dengue that left him hospitalised. “That whole experience of two to three months of suffering — I think that really inspired me to learn programming and to use it as a problem-solving tool,” says Taneja.

He went on to create a web-based tool that uses machine learning to predict how mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever can spread. For his Swift Student Challenge submission, one that he created against the backdrop of Covid-19, Taneja has designed a Swift playground that teaches coding while simulating how a pandemic moves through a population. The tool shows how precautions, such as social distancing and masks, can help slow infection rates.

Taneja says that he created this tool to educate youngsters when he saw that people are not taking warnings issued to handle the pandemic seriously.

Taneja is also passionate about education and has volunteered to teach English and Maths to underprivileged students who cannot afford to pay for tuition. Before he left to study in the US, he created a program that translates popular online education videos into roughly 40 languages, so that children who don’t have physical access to quality education can learn online.

Other winners of the WWDC Swift Student Challenge include 19-year-old Sofia Ongele and 18-year-old Devin Green. All these teens who have been picked as winners share a life goal that has been best summed up by Ongele: “Make some tech and do a whole lot of good along the way.”

Ongele has created ReDawn, an app that helps survivors of sexual assault access resources in a safe, easy and sensitive way. “I wanted to make something that makes this process less isolating,” says Ongele, who has been approached by organisations that want to partner with her on the app.

Green’s winning Swift Student Challenge playground features an artificial-intelligence robot named Stanny that can recognize and respond to 63 different comments and questions. He also has two apps on the App Store, the first of which he built when he was 13.

You can read more about Green and Ongele here.