Toronto Life

toronto tech gurus start young

Tanmay Bakshi is a techy YouTube star who has built apps for the App Store and written a coding textbook— and he’s only 13. We asked the GTA’s smartest kid to tell us his secrets

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You started coding when you were five years old. How did that happen?

My dad used to work as a computer programmer, and I loved to watch him work all day. Eventually, I taught myself programmin­g languages by reading books and the Internet. Technology was a toy, just something fun to play with.

When did you build your first app?

In Grade 3, I couldn’t get the hang of my times tables. I created a simple iOS app called tTables to help me practise. My app was accepted into the App Store on Valentine’s Day of 2013. That was really exciting. Now it has around 12,000 downloads.

What are you most excited about right now?

I’ve been working on a tool that allows audiologis­ts to diagnose hearing disorders through a neural network. The doctor just needs to enter data about the patient and the software will determine what hearing disorder the patient has. It’s challengin­g because the brain’s neural network is a black box— nobody knows what’s going inside of it. I’ve used something called an attention mechanism to decode what’s going on.

Do you plan to stick around the GTA when you grow up?

Yes. I’d love to do medical research, and the influx of technology coming into Toronto is encouragin­g students to get into the industry in the first place. So I’m not going anywhere.

What’s your favourite game?

I like to make games instead of playing them. I incorporat­e artificial intelligen­ce so the games play themselves.

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