Teenage Whiz Kid Invents an AI System to Diagnose Her Grandfather's Eye Disease

When 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu wasn't attending conferences, giving speeches, presiding over her school's bioinformatics society, organizing a research symposium, playing piano, and running a non-profit, she worried about what to do with all her free time. It was June 2016, the summer after her junior year in high school, and Kopparapu was looking for a new project that would use her computer science skills. Her thoughts quickly turned to her grandfather, who lives in a small city on India's eastern coast. In 2013 he began showing symptoms of diabetic retinopathy, a complication of diabetes that damages blood vessels in the retina and can lead to blindness. Eventually he was diagnosed and treated, but not before his vision deteriorated.