Apple wants these Indian students at its WWDC developer conference

Palash Taneja was in grade 10 when he suffered from dengue fever and was bedridden for three months. This 18-year-old from Delhi then created an application that enabled him to check the availability of hospital beds and reserve it. Similarly, Akhil Tolani was 13 years old when he developed a music player application called "iMusic" and launched it in the Apple AppStore. The music player obtained more than 500,000 downloads from users around the world, and three years later it was acquired by a company based in Sweden.

Now Tolani, Taneja and a few others are heading to Apple's annual WWDC developer conference, which begins on June 3 in San Jose, California.

Jay Firke, a student of Macro Vision Academy from Burhanpur is working an e-portfolio iOS app which allows class teachers to fill out the students report about skills and educational topics. "I want to know and learn about new AR," says Firke about what he expects from WWDC.

On the other hand, Taneja wants to get, "understand how an idea or a feature is conceived and implemented in a setting with the scale of not thousands but millions of users." As a child, Taneja used to dismantle toys, electronics and got into programming in grade 5 "to figure out how the software worked."

Each year, Apple at WWDC takes a few student scholars to attend the event, and these students also earn a one-year membership in the Apple Development Program. Sudarshan Sreeram, 17, is one of those who attended WWDC in 2018 and has this to say about his experience. "As a WWDC18 scholarship winner, I can confidently state that attending the conference has certainly taught me a great deal about the systematic processes involved in the iOS application development cycle and the skill set and practices required to push out a successful project."

Sreeram first research paper was written on "Autonomous Robotic System Based Environmental Assessment and Dengue Hot-Spot Identification", which discussed the use of a methodology to utilize a drone, a rover, and image analysis algorithms to identify dengue hotspots. "I presented this work at the 18th IEEE EEEIC, Palermo, Italy," he says.

Tolani, who is 21 years old now, has worked with three startups and his personal apps got over 600,000 downloads on App Store. He is eager to know about the launch of "new frameworks specifically related to the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning domains."