- Abhijit Nath, NET Correspondent, Tripura
Agartala, July 08, 2022 : Tripura’s pride- Puhabi Chakraborty, a recipient of the highest civilian children award ‘Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar’ interacted with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi regarding her developed app ‘AthleteX for Atmanirbhar Bharat’, during the inauguration programme of ‘Digital India Week 2022’ from July 04 last at Gujarat’s Gandhinagar.
She has been chosen along with three other girls from other states. The PM Modi conferred her the highest civilian children award in January 2022. During her past interaction, Modi Ji advised her to develop the app further to help the common man besides the athletes of India.
Demonstrating the developed version of her innovation, Puhabi said “My project’s name is ‘Athletes for the Atmanirbhar’. I am an athlete by myself and have won black belt as an athlete and represent India in many competitions. When I participated at many places, I found that there many athletes who hailed from economically poor backgrounds, they are deprived of resources. I felt bad as to why they can’t give their best performances. That is why I developed this app.”
Puhabi Chakraborti, an athlete turned technological expert at the age of 11 years started training in karate and kickboxing under Pinaki Chakraborty. She pushed the age barriers when she qualified for the black belt in Karate and won two gold medals and one bronze medal for India in an international tournament.
In situations where athletes find it difficult to find external funding, families will often have to support them. These problems pained Puhabi when she observed a lot of athletes ended with a full stop in their sports career. Side by side, the pounding mental pressure on an athlete is also one of the factors for the abrupt ending of their career.
Furthermore, the diet of athletes varies according to their sport. Puhabi also possesses deep empathy for several hardships concerning maintaining good mental and physical health during the sports journey of athletes. Thus, she decided to take matters into her hands and built an AI model collecting real-time data from her fellow mates. She named it AthleteX for Atmanirbhar Bharat Athlete.
Puhabi developed the ‘AtheleteX’ with the help of Intel AI couches while she was participating in the Government of India’s national program for Government Schools- Responsible AI for youth. The program lasted for almost one year, where AI-based student projects were selected from government schools across the country. Initially, responsible AI commenced with more than fifty thousand students participating. Qualifying various levels, Puhabi was among the top 20 winners of the program. This 16-year-old girl, who is currently waiting for her result of the 10th class board exam, is also pursuing two internships in State University of California and State University of New York, where she is working with Cyber Security of a dedicated team under a Professor and few Research Scholar and Postdoc Students. She also successfully completed one month DIY bootcamp training at IIT Delhi during June this year.
