At 21, Prannaya Gupta has built AI systems that can track an air traffic controller’s cognitive state to determine their stress levels, and an audio-to-onscreen lip movement translator that makes phone calls easier for persons with hearing difficulties.
These accomplishments, which he achieved across two different research projects, earned him the IMDA SG Digital Scholarship that allows scholars to take on key tech and media roles in an organisation of their choice.
“The fact that this scholarship gives us the freedom to work in the private sector and explore our career interests was something that really attracted me,” Mr Prannaya explained.
During his two-year National Service (NS) period, he took part in a research project under the Republic of Singapore Air Force’s (RSAF) AETHER (Air Emerging Technologies, High-Speed Experimentations and Research) lab.
There, he was tasked with addressing the issue of air traffic controllers feeling overloaded.
“We entered an air traffic control room, and saw many controllers there struggling to keep up with the demands of a sky that just couldn’t wait,” Mr Prannaya said. “Each of them were managing so many airplanes.”
He explained that it was the norm for a supervisor to manage a fleet of air traffic controllers and if they saw someone looking stressed, they would either step in or eventually allocate a lesser workload to the person.
“It’s a manual process and we wanted to make it more automated,” Mr Prannaya added.
He and his team then created a language model to forecast and interpret neural networks based on electroencephalograms (EEG) and data previously collected by the RSAF.
The end result was a live dashboard that used AI to identify when a controller was stressed in real time and automatically reduced the workload assigned to them.
The NUS High School graduate had acquired a lot of experience in developing applications to solve real-world problems by reading up on research papers uploaded to open-access online platforms such as ArXiv (pronounced “archive”).
It all started during the Covid-19 pandemic when his father nudged him to look up courses on machine learning. “He works in the tech pre-sales industry so he had a lot of background in understanding that AI was the next big thing,” Mr Prannaya said.
Drawn by the mathematical aspect of it, the scholar started to build his own AI models and experimented with different approaches when something did not work. “It’s a new learning opportunity for me every day and that motivated me to pursue it as a career,” he said.
He is currently enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology to study Computer Science.
Fellow scholar Aryan Dalvi, 20, who just began his freshman year at the National University of Singapore, also chose Computer Science as his undergraduate major.
He was one of 12 recipients awarded with the Smart Nation Scholarship, jointly offered by the Cyber Security Agency (CSA), GovTech Singapore and IMDA. This scholarship seeks to develop future leaders who are committed to using technology to create public value.
Mr Aryan exemplified this commitment during his NS, when he participated in the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) x Dell Lifesavers’ Innovation Challenge 2026.
He and his three friends formed a team and conceptualised FireGround Copilot, an agnetic AI decision-support system designed to help ground commanders make faster, better-informed calls during incidents.
The group submitted a detailed proposal and even pitched the idea, but ultimately failed to make the top five teams and unfortunately did not get to see their idea through to creation.
Still, it held much promise. “As a Rota Commander in the SCDF, I noticed that when there’s a lot of influx of information, from different sources as well, sometimes it was overwhelming,” Mr Aryan explained.
Hence, he wanted to develop a platform that could take up all this knowledge and simplify it slightly so that commanders could waste less time processing the information first and then looking towards decision-making.
“Information such as where’s the nearest water hydrant or which staircases you can enter through. By making it much more accessible for our commander is vital for our operations. Even a few seconds do matter when you are at the frontline,” Mr Aryan added.
His fascination with technology began with baseball, particularly the 2011 Hollywood film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as the general manager Billy Beane who used sabermetrics or statistical analysis to assemble a competitive team.
Mr Aryan actually played softball in school, but according to him the two sports are actually quite similar in how they function and how you can use data to track the progress over time.
“Machine learning can help you figure out the patterns that are in place rather than human intuition,” he said. At 17, he went on to learning platforms like Coursera to teach himself the basics of machine learning, a subfield of AI.
When asked if there are any concerns over AI outperforming human intuition, Mr Aryan said: “A calculator can do math much faster than me, but I don’t feel worried about the fact that I can’t keep up.”
