Page 40 - EW August 2023

Young Achievers

language barriers in edu- Vaidhya) jazz musicians. Earlier in
cational video content to September 2021, Lydian became the
disseminate online learning first Indian pianist to perform with
to all corners of the globe. the Symphony Orchestra of India at
Gokul relies on publicly the National Centre for the Perform-
available datasets specific to ing Arts, Mumbai.
each project and primarily Born into a music-loving fam-
utilises the GPU (graphics ily — father Sathish Varshini is an
processing unit) computa- accomplished keyboard player and
tional resources of MBZUAI music director in the Tamil film
and other organisations. industry, and elder sister Amirtha
“These resources help me Varshini is a gifted singer, flautist
train and test machine and pianist — Lydian’s music educa-
learning models effectively. tion began as early as 18 months.
Also, although MBZUAI is “When Lydian started playing beats
a relatively new university, on the floor with xylophone sticks, I
being part of its focused AI decided to buy him an amateur drum
GOKUL KUMAR group has motivated me to push my set. Within six months, he gradu-
ated to standard-size drums,” recalls
limits,” he says.
Gokul has recently signed up with father Sathish.
bu Dhabi (UAE)-based G42’s Inception Institute of Artificial When Lydian turned nine, his
Gokul Karthik Kumar (24) Intelligence in Abu Dhabi as an ap- father enrolled him at the world-
Ais bent on leveraging the plied scientist. “In my current role, famous music composer A.R. Rah-
power of AI (artificial intelligence) I am working collaboratively with man’s KM Music Conservatory’s
to create positive social impact in a team to develop LLMs (large lan- Russian School of Music where he
the world. Among his innovations guage models) specifically tailored trained for four years under the tute-
are a methodology to detect hate for UAE-focused applications. In the lage of pianist Surojit Chatterjee. He
speech in social media memes, future, I intend to continue to engage has since cleared the Trinity College
an AI-human interactive dubbing with AI research and development,” of London’s Grade 8 exams.
platform and deep learning-based he says. Realising early on that both their
text-to-speech systems in 13 Indian Paromita Sengupta (Bengaluru) children were musically gifted and
languages. would need time to devote to music,
An engineering and computer Sathish and his wife Jhansi decided
vision alum of Anna University, to homeschool them academically
Chennai and Mohamed bin Zayed LYDIAN NADHASWARAM with a strong emphasis on languages
University of Artificial Intelligence, and math learning, leaving him
Abu Dhabi (MBZUAI, estb.2019), enough time for piano practice.
Gokul has won several hackathon hennai-based teenage music Lydian has set his sights high.
tournaments including the IEEE prodigy Lydian Nadhaswaram “I am looking for an opportunity
SLT 2022 international hack- C(17) sprang into the global in Hollywood. Music is a universal
athon in Qatar, and eight national limelight after he won the $1 mil- language transcending national
hackathons in the UAE and India. lion (Rs.7 crore) The World’s Best boundaries. I want to compose up-
Currently, he holds a US patent for (American reality show) title in 2019 lifting music and spread peace and
sales forecasting using an N-gram for piano proficiency, and wowed harmony worldwide,” says the young
model. viewers on The Ellen DeGeneres virtuoso.
While at MBZUAI, Gokul’s re- Show with blindfold piano play. In Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai)
search projects focused on multilin- addition, he plays 18 musical and
gual Q&A and multimodal hateful percussion instruments.
meme recognition. According to The first and only student
him, what started as academic trainee of well-known music
assignments resulted in research composer Ilaiyaraaja, Lydian is
publications with breakthrough currently composing the musi-
findings presented at highly re- cal score of Barroz, a Malay-
garded international conferences alam-language children’s film
and workshops, the latest being the directed by superstar Mohanlal.
International Conference on Acous- Last July, the teenage
tics, Speech and Signal Processing maestro released a jazz album
(ICASSP) 2023 staged in Greece in Chromatic Grammatic in col-
June. laboration with international
Moreover, he is also jointly (Dave Weckl, Frank Gambale,
developing the award-winning Eric Marienthal) and a few
Autodub, a human-in-the-loop AI Indian (Gino Banks, Mohini
dubbing platform that eliminates Dey, Sivamani, and Rajhesh

40 EDUCATIONWORLD AUGUST 2023