Surya Sridharan, a high school student at Inventure Academy in India, is deeply passionate about science. He aspires to leverage his knowledge to benefit the community and assist others.
In the ChangeMakerChallenge 2022, Surya was a winner with his “Community Lending Library” project. He successfully piloted this initiative across two communities. Surya worked on user research, developed onboarding flows, promoted the service, and gathered customer feedback. He also presented in the Changemaker competition, which helped obtain funding for growth. In ChangeMakerChallenge 2021, he won with his project “World of Comics,” designed to enhance mental health and connectedness in educational institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project was utilised by teachers as an educational tool. Additionally, Surya actively participated in multiple hackathons, showcasing his skills in Python and AppScript.
Besides, Surya served as a tutor and tech mentor for 7th-grade students in a peer-learning programme. He implemented a Tutor-Tutee match algorithm to streamline the process. Furthermore, he founded and taught at the VS Study Group, where he instructed multiple batches of students in reciting the Vishnu Sahasranamam, a more than 3000-year-old scripture, by oral tradition.
As a participant in the CCIR Academy, Surya conducted a research project titled “How Does News Sentiment Affect Propagation on Twitter?” His study focused on Twitter’s evolution as a news consumption platform, highlighting the significance of features like the retweet button in news dissemination. Surya’s research also explored the prevalence of negative tweets on Twitter and examined how demographic factors influenced individuals’ responses to positive and negative news.
This paper was recently accepted for poster presentation at the International Conference on Network Science (NetSci 2023) in Vienna, Austria. He was the only high school student at the conference; other presenters were established researchers and scholars from leading institutes. Furthermore, Surya’s contributions at the conference caught the attention of the organisers, leading to his inclusion in the official NetSci2023 conference video, highlighting his journey as a young researcher.
In a recent episode of CCIR Academy Student Spotlights, Surya shared valuable insights from his research journey and expressed gratitude for the support provided by his professor and the CCIR Academy throughout his research endeavours.
