Kautilya Kataria who lives with his techie parents Ishwari and Trupti in Northampton, England was born in Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh.

That fact has made everyone, including the Indian PR machinery, celebrate this “Indian Genius’. The youngest computer programmer, and has set new Guinness World Record for completing IBM’s AI certification.

Kautilya, who managed to put his name in the record book when he was 6 years 346 days old, attended courses in data science as well as artificial intelligence. The young computer enthusiast was the new subject of IBM’s blog post. IBM also shared the courses that enabled Kautilya to achieve his current success. Kautilya is seven years old.

Kautilya received five different certificates from IBM in the Python Software language and artificial intelligence fields in November 2020. Kautilya completed the Foundations of AI and Python for Data Science courses at IBM’s edX.

When it is expected for kids to play with electric cars and toys, this boy worked on his interest towards coding and learnt whatever he could from the books about computing. Using the period of lockdown, Kautilya Kataria started coding and now can even code fluently in Python, which is a high-level programming language used by national and international tech companies.

Easy AI

“We were looking for other certifications he could try when we thought to contact Guinness World Records,” says Ishwari, his father , a Northampton based IT developer.

“The record for Youngest Computer Programmer was help by Armahn Om Talsania in India one day before his seventh birthday, in January 2020.

“So in September, they looked at Kautilya’s work, including his website and his qualifications. He was awarded the record twenty days before his second birthday.”

“The record is nice to have,” says dad Ishwari, . “But the best thing is it’s self driven.”

Mum Trupti – a data analyst – agrees. “I’m happy as he did it while still being a child. He still plays with his friends. He’s still full of mischief.”

In an interview he said, ” It’s very easy to learn AI. I could have started coding even when I was 4.5 years old, which is just one year before I actually started learning it.”

The 6 year old geek seems to have not only theoretical knowledge but also posses how AI is applicable in practical and said “Amazon uses search algorithms to look for what you type in the search bar and so does Google.”

IBM wasn’t joking when it said developers of any age seeking to advance their skills can earn several new professional certificates in areas including cloud and AI.

And Kautilya Kataria is a quintessential example of how even a 6 year old can learn so much if there’s a will to do so. In an answer about how AI works Kautilya said giving the example of Netflix, ” Netflix keeps its data in a model to see what you most like so they can give you a recommendation. I think it’s either machine learning or deep learning. And if it is machine learning, it’s probably supervised learning.”

Learning in Action

Using the IBM Watson ( an AI Technology software ) Kautilya Kataria made a program which can detect whether there’s smoke or fire. As the program is works on image recognition principal, Kautilya says that it can be used with high risk of fire and connect the camera with his AI model to detect whether it’s smoke or fire and can call a fire fighter accordingly.

He has also made a chat bot of his own and in future plans to build a robot that can turn into almost anything. He claims to have an idea about it and purposes that either aluminium or carbon nanotubes could be used when scientists find a way to make the material longer without reducing its strength.

But in the meantime, he is still seven. He loves swimming and playing on his bike. He is still a keen reader and loves learning, and has a happy a family life with his little brother.

[Written with inputs from various media sources by intern Nishant Mishra]

  children, Kautilya Kataria