Future Leaders winner using technology in Colorado to create solutions
Throughout the school year, CBS Colorado, along with Chevron and Colorado School of Mines, recognizes six high school students who excel in science, technology, engineering and math, STEM. The Future Leaders Award comes with $1,000 and a profile on CBS News Colorado.
The latest winner of the Future Leaders award is Siddhartha Aradhya, a senior at Rock Canyon High School in Douglas County.
Aradhya is taking a full load of Advanced Placement classes, but that doesn't stop him from being on the track and cross country teams. He's also working on several projects outside of school. Aradhya had a firsthand experience with online predators.
"We had a fake account, a fake Instagram account and we got a lot of weird messages on it. We took it to the police," he explained.
From that interaction, Aradhya got the idea to write CatchChat, a program that helps law enforcement catfish online predators.
"They're not always trained to talk like, say, a 16-year-old girl," Aradhya said of investigators.
The AI in CatchChat can do it for them. Type the offender's message into the program, and it can give you appropriate emojis or slang to continue the conversation. Right now, the Douglas County Sheriff's Department is testing the program for Aradhya.
"The goal is that we want to automize the process fully so the police officers who are trained to do so many incredible things can then go do those incredible things and not have to do something that they're not trained at," Aradhya said.
Aradhya created another computer program to help workers identify if water is tainted.
"It's just a program where you'd upload microscopic images and ou'd see whether they're certain types of algae," he said.
Algae blooms are toxic in drinking water, so Aradhya is developing a drone that would emit light to kill algae. This project is in the testing phase.
"There's different parts of the experiment that you want to test, like what type of light? How far the light should go?"
"Is the environment kind of a passion of yours?" asked First Alert Chief Meteorologist Dave Aguilera.
"I really like dinosaurs," Aradhya replied. "I've just always been interested in like environments and the natural world."
"Have you been out to Dinosaur Ridge?" Aguilera followed up.
"Yea, I love Dinosaur Ridge," Aradhya answered.
He also loves helping his fellow students. He served on the Student Advisory Committee to the Douglas County School Board.
"I was more involved with financial literacy, so like getting a curriculum across schools that wouldn't interfere with students time that much," he said.
"That's such a great idea because there's not much of that," Aguilera said.
"Yea, you know how to do algebra but not your taxes," Aradhya said with a laugh.
He expanded on those lessons and created a nonprofit called The More You Know. Now, he shares the knowledge with organizations that what to offer financial literacy to their clients.
Aradhya plans to go to college but he hopes to find time to continue working on these projects that he's already started.
"Specifically CatchChat is probably the one that I'm most excited about. I want to keep automaking that," he said.
LINK: Future Leaders Award
CBS News Colorado will be taking nominations for its Future Leaders Award through April 18, 2025.
