From zero coding experience to an IEEE acceptance as a 9th grader
Sai developed AHIRRS, an Automated Hybrid In-Situ River Remediation System for cleaning the Yamuna River. The 22km Wazirabad-Okhla stretch in Delhi-NCR receives roughly 3,491 million liters of sewage daily against a treatment gap of 900 million liters per day. His framework proposes compact decentralized treatment units placed directly in the river at pollution hotspots, using machine learning to analyze water quality data and optimize treatment in real time.
Environmental Engineering
Accepted at IEEE ICSCSS 2026
IEEE ICSCSS 2026, 2026
Sai Tarekar, YRI Fellow
A 9th grader at Woodstock School with zero research experience, zero coding experience and no prior mentor or science fair background.
IEEE conference acceptance with a novel environmental remediation framework and ML-based water quality analysis.
“I am interested in environmental research which focuses on the health of flowing rivers. I seek to explore how humans are affecting rivers and how can the current treatment methods be bettered for a greater impact.”
Accepted at IEEE ICSCSS 2026, the 4th International Conference on Sustainable Computing and Smart Systems, July 22 to 24, 2026
Analyzed 3,491 million liters of daily sewage across the Wazirabad-Okhla stretch
Designed a decentralized in-situ treatment framework with ML-powered water quality prediction
Went from a self-rated 1 out of 5 in coding to a peer-reviewed research paper
Aarnav Bhat, Accepted at IEEE ICITSIF 2026