YRI Fellow Suriya Dev Saravanakumar, a 9th grader at Doha College in Qatar, has had his research paper accepted at IEEE EMBC 2026 - the 48th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, taking place July 26-30 in Toronto, Canada.
IEEE EMBC is widely regarded as the world's largest and most prestigious biomedical engineering conference, making this an extraordinary achievement for a high school freshman with no prior research experience.
Suriya's paper, "Calibration Reliability of Eye-Tracking-Based Alzheimer's Disease Models Under Signal Degradation" (Paper ID: 1706), presents a machine learning framework that analyzes eye-tracking patterns to distinguish Alzheimer's patients from healthy controls.
The research evaluates multiple ML models including Gradient Boosting, Random Forest, and Neural Networks, using ten-fold cross-validation to assess reliability. Key findings include:
- ROC-AUC of 0.75 for the best-performing model
- Horizontal eye-position measures identified as the strongest diagnostic indicators
- Each eye-tracking feature captures a different aspect of cognitive decline, providing complementary diagnostic signals
When Suriya joined the YRI Fellowship in September 2025, he had:
- Zero research experience
- No prior mentorship or science fair background
- A clear vision: "I want to use AI to detect Alzheimer's from eye movements"
Within months, working with YRI mentors, he developed a complete computational framework, wrote a full research paper, and submitted to one of the most competitive conferences in biomedical engineering.
Suriya will present his research at IEEE EMBC 2026 in Toronto this July. He's also working toward his goal of competing at ISEF-level science fairs and eventually building a company based on his research.
His journey proves that age and experience are not barriers to world-class research - the right mentorship and structured guidance can take a motivated student from zero to an international conference in under a year.
Interested in following a similar path? Apply to the YRI Fellowship and start your research journey.