At first glance, you'd think Guha, Kamlesh, Jayash and Avaneesh were attending a routine computer science class. However, the eleventh graders of DAV Boys Senior Secondary School in Chennai are actually improving a software platform they developed earlier this year — one that helps autistic children understand facial expressions.

All it took was a laptop, some scratch code and time spent training a computer to understand the link between words and human emotions.

Children with autism face difficulties when it comes to social interaction and communication due to repeated thought and behavioural patterns brought about by a neuro-developmental condition. Typically, such children have difficulty with activities that are considered simple — like reading facial expressions.

Taking off on this premise, the group decided to teach a machine-learning program how to read facial expressions, which could then help the children with autism decipher non-verbal cues.

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The idea stems from a simple, yet crucial concept. "Initially, we created five labels to denote five emotions, and then we went about forming prominent examples for these emotions," said Avaneesh Venkatakrishnan, one of the students who worked on the project.

“For example: ‘I really like the rain today’ is an expression of happiness. So we put it under 'happy'," the added. He said this way the machine clearly knows if a person enters this sentence, it will categorise it under 'happy' and help the autistic person express that emotion.

Over time, the student group kept categorising new sentences under emotions like 'happy', 'anxious', 'sad' and more, while training the machine to understand them, and emote accordingly with the help of ‘emojis’.

“When big tech giants make machine-learning programs, they feed these programs with billions of data,” said Jayash Suryawanshi, another student on the four-member team, “Due to a time crunch, we could only feed it with 200 to 300 sentences,” he added.

The group’s idea came from a 21-day project overseen by Chennai-based EduTech platform Kruu. The startup believes that with 2.2 lakh students on its platform, the possibilities for more such innovation are endless.

“I couldn't be more thrilled that these are students who are 14 or 15 years old, who without being told what empathy is and without being told what it means to work for the sake of other children, have done it automatically,” said Anil Srinivasan, the co-founder of Kruu Inc. “Technology has made that possible,” he added.

Back at school, the boys are far from done. They are now working on a Python version of their machine learning tool, which means greater accuracy, and the capability to input, collate, and process a lot more data, quicker.

Interestingly enough, the project and its success, has not automatically meant that the four are actively looking at becoming tech founders. For Guha, Kamlesh, Jayash and Avaneesh, it's still about using technology to reach children who need it.

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