Adrit Rao is not like most teenagers. At 15, he goes to high school. But he is also writing peer-reviewed medical papers for a Stanford internship, creating an AI-powered tool to solve medical issues, managing five apps he created, and running a nonprofit he founded, Arètech Inc.
Rao got into programming at 8 years old and app development at 12. He's been interning at Stanford University since he was 13, the age when he started presenting at medical conferences. If you're feeling intimidated, you're not alone.
Some would call Adrit Rao a genius. But besides brains, he has tenacity, confidence and conviction. Work + Money caught up with Rao to talk about his latest app to help the deaf community, his impressive journey and the secret to success at such a young age.
*Interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Work + Money: How did you start with block programming and how did that lead to you building your own apps?
Adrit Rao: Schools around Palo Alto try to incorporate a lot of STEM into programs. Block programming was introduced to us as kids. But when I was around 8 years old, I wanted to migrate from block programming to something like text-based programming, so I tried out a few languages.
And what I realized was that it didn't actually fascinate me that much because I wanted to see an end product that could be used to solve a problem. And that's when I thought of apps.
Using Apple's programming language, Swift, I got introduced to programming apps. At first, it seemed like it would be really daunting, but there are lots of courses online, which really helped me in my journey. And I only started that when I was around 12 years old. But because of all the great resources out there that I think a lot of kids can use, it was really easy. What was really exciting for me was that I could write some code in Swift and right next to that, I could see an app come to life.
Two weeks or so after [I started developing apps], Apple was holding its annual developer's conference called WWDC. Every year, they hold a Swift student challenge. When I saw that opportunity, I wanted to test my luck. To my surprise, I actually won that year. I was one of the 12 kids that met Tim Cook. It was super exciting at that time.
Work + Money: That's cool. It seems like a lot of what you do, both in apps and your Stanford research, has to do with using technology to improve lives. What makes you feel so passionate about that?
Adrit Rao: I realized how accessible apps are because just from my computer at home, I could reach a lot of people. A program that I wrote could reach lots and lots of people's iPhones using Swift. So that's when I started to think, "I can actually make a difference, even though I'm young. I could still try to find a problem in my community or a social problem (or now, in my Stanford internship, a healthcare problem), and I could try to create an app that could solve that problem."
That's kind of what my goal has been with my apps. And now I have five in the app store. My most recent one is called Signer. I was reading an article about how there is a lot of discrepancy between the number of people who communicate in American Sign Language and the number of people who [can't communicate with it]. So there's a big communication barrier between the two communities.
So I used one of Apple's frameworks called Core ML - I used [it] in the past just to experiment, but this was my first time using it in one of my apps - to train a model or an algorithm to look at videos of people's hands and automatically convert them to ASL. I've done so with around 10 gestures so far, and I'm constantly trying to update that and increase the library of gestures.