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2018 Speakers

Face photo of Tanmay Bakshi Tanmay Bakshi IBM Champion and Honorary Cloud Advisor

Tanmay, age 14, an IBM Champion and Honorary Cloud Advisor, began coding at the age of five. He is among the youngest cognitive and cloud computing developers who build applications engineered to augment human capabilities via deep learning. Over the last nine years, his passion for learning and sharing about numerous topics, such as cognitive computing and AI, has taught him how to best utilize and apply machine learning in fields ranging from banking and finance to healthcare, medicine, music, and chatbots. Tanmay is currently working to achieve his goal of inspiring and training 100,000 kids and novice developers through the books he’s authoring and the tutorials on his YouTube channel. He is also developing a unique system for those with Rett Syndrome, so they can “speak” through the detection and interpretation of EEG signals analyzed by neural network systems.

Click here for Tanmay Bakshi's talk!

Face photo of Team Transcendence Team Transcendence

NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest

Every year, NASA poses a variety of challenges to high school students. One of the challenges is the NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest that requires students to design a self-sustainable orbital space settlement. A group of 5 grade 12 students from Central Peel submitted a project called Transcedence … Innovation beyond the extent of time… The 138-page document submitted to NASA is an interdisciplinary research project that involves:

Technical details – structural overview, externally operating mechanical systems
Analysis of sustainable methods to support life on the settlement
Detailed description of the sociopolitical system including education, political system, legislative system, health system

  • Economical system
  • Research and Development
  • Energy sustainability analysis

This year, NASA received more than 1500 projects from 6000 students from all over the world. The Central Peel team came second in the grade 12 category. It was the only Canadian team that received an award this year. As a result, they attended the 2017 International Space Development Conference in St. Louis, MO. At the conference they presented their project both in an oral and a poster presentation.

The team was also showcased in media. For example,

The Central Peel team received congratulatory letters from both the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and from Navdeep Bains, the Ontario Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development.

The five Brampton students were also invited to share their project and their vision for a future in space with children at the AstroNuts: Sixth Annual “What’s Up in Space?” Camp & STEM Contest.

Click here for presentation slides.