October 22, 2024 • 12 mins
Watch Carol and Tim LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF.
Aditya Banerji, Senior Research Engineer of 3M’s Corporate Research Process Laboratory and Sirish Subash, winner of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, talk about Sirish creating an AI-based handheld pesticide detector.
Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. It is Bloomberg Business Week. And
I want to know, Carol Masser, Yes, what you were
doing when you were in ninth grade?
Speaker 3 (00:20):
For sure?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
High school? Yeah, I don't know, just trying to gymnastics, gymnastics, cheerleading,
trying to get a's, getting a's.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
You were you anywhere close to creating an AI based
handsheld pesticide detector?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
That would be a no, okay.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
That's what sir rich Subash has been up to. He's
in ninth grade and that creation helped crown him the
winner of the twenty twenty four to three M Young
Scientists Challenge. Also includes a nice twenty five thousand dollars
cash prize, a trip here to New York, YEP to
Ring the Belt, to New York Stock Exchange, and yes,
gets to hang out.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
With us, which I think is just the biggest prize.
That's their round series.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Shabash is the winner of the twenty twenty four three
M Young sign Into His Challenge and Aditya B Energy
is senior Research energy of the corporate Research Process lab
over at three am. They both join us in our
Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. Very cool to have you both here.
Congratulations Soris. First, I want to ask you Aditya tell
us about this challenge, how long you've been doing it,
(01:20):
how it came about, and why you're doing it.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
So the Three and Young Scientist Challenge has been around
for seventeen years. This is my first year doing this mentorship,
so I'm just awfully lucky to be paired with Series
and it has been an awesome experience. Our goal as
part of the Three and Young Scientist Challenge is to
nurture and just work with such young, bright, young minds
(01:47):
and just help them bring their imagination their creations to life.
So I mean, we live by science applied to life,
so they have all the science innovations in their mind.
We have experience in getting the signs to people's hands,
so we hope that we can bridge the gap for
(02:08):
them to take his concepts to hands off consumers and
help them in any way possible to make that journey smooth.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Well, Series, tell us about what you have sitting in
front of you, because it looks like an iPhone attached
to some sort of gizmo here, what's going on?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
So my device, my project, it's called Pesti scanned. And
so what it is is at home people can scan
for pesticide residues on their produce items. That's the real
core concept here because there's a lot of contaminants like
pestide residues they can stick around on produce after washing
where they've been linked to health issues like certain cancers
(02:46):
and Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, near degenerative diseases along those lines.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
You can pick that up and you can there's a
camera right there in front of you for those watching
on YouTube, Elizabeth's going to get a shot of this thing.
It's pretty cool. So there's an app that goes with it.
There's also some hardware there. It uses a type of
technology I practiced so many times saying this type of technology,
can you say it.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
For me please, spectro photometry.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Spectro photometry, yeah, and what does that do?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
So the idea is different materials reflect and absorb different
wavelengths of light. So pesti scan can look for those
wavelengths that are reflected and absorbed by pest said residues.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So okay, so we are very lucky that we have
a lot of food here at Bloomberg and a lot
of fresh fruit, and we all tap into it. I've
just had a banana and often tap an apple or
some other things. We had some grapefruit this morning. You
picked up an apple in our food court up in
the link on the sixth floor, and so tell us
show us how it works and what you do, and
then what you found out.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
So for using the actual device, you just connect the
app to the device. You just turn both on. You
point the device at the protocetem and then you tap
scan and in a couple of seconds the results are back.
And this apple had no PESTI residues on it at
all score.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Which makes I don't know if these are organic apples.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
I don't know that they are either, but.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That's good to know it does. There is a sign
upstairs that says please wash fruit before eating it. But
sometimes you know, people go and like check the peaches
to make sure they're soft.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
I check out a few things. It's really fascinating. So
how did you how did you kind of come up
with the idea, how did you pull it together? And
how did you use your mentor to help you?
Speaker 3 (04:31):
So The whole concept really started when I was having
a conversation with my mom. So she was insisting that
I washed my produce before consuming.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
It, right, And yeah, Mom, okay, Mom, you gotta wash
your produce ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
And my question was why and how effective is it?
So looking into that, I saw that there were a
bunch of caminists like pested residues that can be on produce,
but washing isn't necessarily completely effective, like the residues do
stay on afterward. So the idea is if we could
detect them, we could make sure that we weren't consuming them.
(05:05):
And that's really where the idea for pesti scan came from.
So after I started building the device and I joined
the three Scientist Challenge, my mentor Aditya has been really
helpful with this, especially when I've gotten stuck. One big
time was when I was designing my machine learning models,
and these are what take the actual data from the
sensor and then turn that into results. What you'd see
(05:27):
on the screen whether the device has pest said residues,
whether the princess pest said residues or not. And he's
helped me when I get stuck, He's helped me get unstuck.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Did you I want to ask you, so, what's the
balance of here's how you do it and solving the
problem and helping him to say, you've got this problem,
let me steer you so that you figure it out yourself.
Speaker 5 (05:52):
You got that exactly right. Like I said, our goal
is to help nurture them. So I would pose it
as like a have you thought about this? Have you
thought about that? And he, being a very meticulous and
very energetic person, he would do his homework and he
would make sure he follows up on that and next
(06:13):
next week when we chat, he would inevitably come up
with a solution.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
So, Sirish is in.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Is in Georgia, Snowville, Georgia. You're in Minneapolis.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yep?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
You guys meeting like on zoom once a week? How
was it? How did this work?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yep?
Speaker 5 (06:30):
We would meet after his school's done once a week
and have a conversation about what he has been up
to last week, anything he wanted to discuss with me,
any next steps and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Can you talk a little bits about how you got
introduced to this program, because it's my understanding that you've
known about the Young Scientists Challenge from three AM since
you were in second grade?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yes, this is I had. I learned about the Third
Being Scientist Challenge when Guitan Chleirau got nominated as Times
Kind of the Year, and when I learned about it
and what the challenge really stood for what it was doing,
I thought that this would be a great place for
me to submit my inventions. That was really because I
wanted I've always wanted to have to leave an impact
(07:19):
on the world nice and a good way to leave
society a better place, and that was I thought three
that the Curreemming Science Challenge would be a great place
for me to start with that. So I skipped fifth grade,
so I wasn't able to put it in then sixth
grade our family was in India and we weren't able
to get things figured out. Seventh grade I did apply,
(07:40):
but it didn't quite work out. And this year I
was able to get it in and everything worked out. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Did I hear you say inventions plural?
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah? So I've worked on a couple of things before. Okay,
Pestiscan maybe the one single project that I've put in
my most time in too. So I've built a couple
of things before I made one robot to deliver books
that was probably the runner up to this, and how
much time I put into it that took. I've spent
four or five months on that. I've spent about a
(08:14):
year on this latest version.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
So what's the commercialization of this? Because I think I
could see I would love to have one in my home,
and I'm sure you would.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Or even just an app that could do this using
technology that exists inside a phone already.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
Right, so you're at the grocery store, You're like, oh,
this is good to.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Go exactly right, Like we do barcodes of things to
find out pricing or whatever or information. So did you
how do you guys think about like just three AM,
who's known for like all their different products, and it's
not just posted, it's a lot of different things. So
I'm just curious, do you see something like this and say, okay,
there's commercial applications?
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Well for sure. I mean part of our conversations was
how do you simplify the prototype? That was one of
the driving questions that he seek to answer during the summer.
He started off with making the module simpler, something that
you can just clip onto your phone so that it
can be used for a consumer. He did a lot
of work in driving down the unit cost of each
(09:10):
of the modules and he already has plans to drive
it down even lower. So he is already on it.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Well, what do you guys do next? I mean, these
guys know, I'm like super obsessed with Shark Tank and
when people pitch their ideas. But what do you do
to help him? Maybe is it on his own or
do you guys work with him to kind of get
it to the next step.
Speaker 5 (09:28):
So he would be driving a lot on his own,
but we are always there to support him whenever there's
anything that we can help out, me personally, three them
as a company, we would definitely be more than happy
to help him out. And also the Three Young Scientists
Challenge alumnize. They have a grant program that has been
set up, so there are a lot of alumnies who
(09:49):
leverage that to fund their programs in the future as well.
So that is something that's all set up that can
be used.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
So what do you want to do, like our venture
capitals your door, You've got a few more years, I
imagine you want to continue your education?
Speaker 4 (10:04):
What's the plan here?
Speaker 3 (10:05):
So the big the big next steps are I'm trying
to scale shrink this quite a bit to where it
would be far more portable and easier for a consumer
to carry around. And then from there also just dropping
the cost to where I could easily go into people's homes.
That was that's those are my key plans for this device,
in particular.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
How much how much what's the cost associated with this prototype?
Like how much would this device cost as is now?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
So as of now for this setup, I were to
make a hundred of them, that would be seventy five dollars.
But for I have a plan laid out to where
there's there's a solution. I can put this onto a
printed circuit board, which would make this all one singular piece,
and that would bring the price down to roughly thirty
(10:52):
five dollars. But I'm looking forward to in the future
reach your price, stager, maybe twenty dollars cool.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Right, Like I don't yeah, I just think about do
you have it in the supermarket where people can I
don't know, or does everybody have their own and check
it out? Really really cool? One thing I want to
ask you. We often talk with folks about the importance
of STEM education and companies, whether it's they're out in
Silicon Valley or thinking about the next generation of workers
that they need. Is this part of why three M
(11:22):
is looking to do this?
Speaker 5 (11:23):
Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean we have a we if
we seek to educate or reach out to folks about
science and how it's integral part of our life. We
have a great science advocacy team if within three them
as well. And that's also one of the reasons why
during this program we get to meet young brilliant minds
(11:47):
like him, and we try our best to like I say,
nurture and mold them and inspire them to do something
like he said, like science is part of it. Merging
with the society. That's another huge thing that we see.
So what he's doing pretty close society bigger, Yeah, society better.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
That's what we hope for the bigger impact. Srich congratulations,
sabash Aditya benergi A three M guys, thank you so much.
This is Bloomberg
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. It is Bloomberg Business Week. And
I want to know, Carol Masser, Yes, what you were
doing when you were in ninth grade?
Speaker 3 (00:20):
For sure?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
High school? Yeah, I don't know, just trying to gymnastics, gymnastics, cheerleading,
trying to get a's, getting a's.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
You were you anywhere close to creating an AI based
handsheld pesticide detector?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
That would be a no, okay.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
That's what sir rich Subash has been up to. He's
in ninth grade and that creation helped crown him the
winner of the twenty twenty four to three M Young
Scientists Challenge. Also includes a nice twenty five thousand dollars
cash prize, a trip here to New York, YEP to
Ring the Belt, to New York Stock Exchange, and yes,
gets to hang out.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
With us, which I think is just the biggest prize.
That's their round series.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Shabash is the winner of the twenty twenty four three
M Young sign Into His Challenge and Aditya B Energy
is senior Research energy of the corporate Research Process lab
over at three am. They both join us in our
Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. Very cool to have you both here.
Congratulations Soris. First, I want to ask you Aditya tell
us about this challenge, how long you've been doing it,
(01:20):
how it came about, and why you're doing it.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
So the Three and Young Scientist Challenge has been around
for seventeen years. This is my first year doing this mentorship,
so I'm just awfully lucky to be paired with Series
and it has been an awesome experience. Our goal as
part of the Three and Young Scientist Challenge is to
nurture and just work with such young, bright, young minds
(01:47):
and just help them bring their imagination their creations to life.
So I mean, we live by science applied to life,
so they have all the science innovations in their mind.
We have experience in getting the signs to people's hands,
so we hope that we can bridge the gap for
(02:08):
them to take his concepts to hands off consumers and
help them in any way possible to make that journey smooth.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Well, Series, tell us about what you have sitting in
front of you, because it looks like an iPhone attached
to some sort of gizmo here, what's going on?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
So my device, my project, it's called Pesti scanned. And
so what it is is at home people can scan
for pesticide residues on their produce items. That's the real
core concept here because there's a lot of contaminants like
pestide residues they can stick around on produce after washing
where they've been linked to health issues like certain cancers
(02:46):
and Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, near degenerative diseases along those lines.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
You can pick that up and you can there's a
camera right there in front of you for those watching
on YouTube, Elizabeth's going to get a shot of this thing.
It's pretty cool. So there's an app that goes with it.
There's also some hardware there. It uses a type of
technology I practiced so many times saying this type of technology,
can you say it.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
For me please, spectro photometry.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Spectro photometry, yeah, and what does that do?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
So the idea is different materials reflect and absorb different
wavelengths of light. So pesti scan can look for those
wavelengths that are reflected and absorbed by pest said residues.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So okay, so we are very lucky that we have
a lot of food here at Bloomberg and a lot
of fresh fruit, and we all tap into it. I've
just had a banana and often tap an apple or
some other things. We had some grapefruit this morning. You
picked up an apple in our food court up in
the link on the sixth floor, and so tell us
show us how it works and what you do, and
then what you found out.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
So for using the actual device, you just connect the
app to the device. You just turn both on. You
point the device at the protocetem and then you tap
scan and in a couple of seconds the results are back.
And this apple had no PESTI residues on it at
all score.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Which makes I don't know if these are organic apples.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
I don't know that they are either, but.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That's good to know it does. There is a sign
upstairs that says please wash fruit before eating it. But
sometimes you know, people go and like check the peaches
to make sure they're soft.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
I check out a few things. It's really fascinating. So
how did you how did you kind of come up
with the idea, how did you pull it together? And
how did you use your mentor to help you?
Speaker 3 (04:31):
So The whole concept really started when I was having
a conversation with my mom. So she was insisting that
I washed my produce before consuming.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
It, right, And yeah, Mom, okay, Mom, you gotta wash
your produce ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
And my question was why and how effective is it?
So looking into that, I saw that there were a
bunch of caminists like pested residues that can be on produce,
but washing isn't necessarily completely effective, like the residues do
stay on afterward. So the idea is if we could
detect them, we could make sure that we weren't consuming them.
(05:05):
And that's really where the idea for pesti scan came from.
So after I started building the device and I joined
the three Scientist Challenge, my mentor Aditya has been really
helpful with this, especially when I've gotten stuck. One big
time was when I was designing my machine learning models,
and these are what take the actual data from the
sensor and then turn that into results. What you'd see
(05:27):
on the screen whether the device has pest said residues,
whether the princess pest said residues or not. And he's
helped me when I get stuck, He's helped me get unstuck.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Did you I want to ask you, so, what's the
balance of here's how you do it and solving the
problem and helping him to say, you've got this problem,
let me steer you so that you figure it out yourself.
Speaker 5 (05:52):
You got that exactly right. Like I said, our goal
is to help nurture them. So I would pose it
as like a have you thought about this? Have you
thought about that? And he, being a very meticulous and
very energetic person, he would do his homework and he
would make sure he follows up on that and next
(06:13):
next week when we chat, he would inevitably come up
with a solution.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
So, Sirish is in.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Is in Georgia, Snowville, Georgia. You're in Minneapolis.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yep?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
You guys meeting like on zoom once a week? How
was it? How did this work?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yep?
Speaker 5 (06:30):
We would meet after his school's done once a week
and have a conversation about what he has been up
to last week, anything he wanted to discuss with me,
any next steps and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Can you talk a little bits about how you got
introduced to this program, because it's my understanding that you've
known about the Young Scientists Challenge from three AM since
you were in second grade?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yes, this is I had. I learned about the Third
Being Scientist Challenge when Guitan Chleirau got nominated as Times
Kind of the Year, and when I learned about it
and what the challenge really stood for what it was doing,
I thought that this would be a great place for
me to submit my inventions. That was really because I
wanted I've always wanted to have to leave an impact
(07:19):
on the world nice and a good way to leave
society a better place, and that was I thought three
that the Curreemming Science Challenge would be a great place
for me to start with that. So I skipped fifth grade,
so I wasn't able to put it in then sixth
grade our family was in India and we weren't able
to get things figured out. Seventh grade I did apply,
(07:40):
but it didn't quite work out. And this year I
was able to get it in and everything worked out. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Did I hear you say inventions plural?
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah? So I've worked on a couple of things before. Okay,
Pestiscan maybe the one single project that I've put in
my most time in too. So I've built a couple
of things before I made one robot to deliver books
that was probably the runner up to this, and how
much time I put into it that took. I've spent
four or five months on that. I've spent about a
(08:14):
year on this latest version.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
So what's the commercialization of this? Because I think I
could see I would love to have one in my home,
and I'm sure you would.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Or even just an app that could do this using
technology that exists inside a phone already.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
Right, so you're at the grocery store, You're like, oh,
this is good to.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Go exactly right, Like we do barcodes of things to
find out pricing or whatever or information. So did you
how do you guys think about like just three AM,
who's known for like all their different products, and it's
not just posted, it's a lot of different things. So
I'm just curious, do you see something like this and say, okay,
there's commercial applications?
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Well for sure. I mean part of our conversations was
how do you simplify the prototype? That was one of
the driving questions that he seek to answer during the summer.
He started off with making the module simpler, something that
you can just clip onto your phone so that it
can be used for a consumer. He did a lot
of work in driving down the unit cost of each
(09:10):
of the modules and he already has plans to drive
it down even lower. So he is already on it.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Well, what do you guys do next? I mean, these
guys know, I'm like super obsessed with Shark Tank and
when people pitch their ideas. But what do you do
to help him? Maybe is it on his own or
do you guys work with him to kind of get
it to the next step.
Speaker 5 (09:28):
So he would be driving a lot on his own,
but we are always there to support him whenever there's
anything that we can help out, me personally, three them
as a company, we would definitely be more than happy
to help him out. And also the Three Young Scientists
Challenge alumnize. They have a grant program that has been
set up, so there are a lot of alumnies who
(09:49):
leverage that to fund their programs in the future as well.
So that is something that's all set up that can
be used.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
So what do you want to do, like our venture
capitals your door, You've got a few more years, I
imagine you want to continue your education?
Speaker 4 (10:04):
What's the plan here?
Speaker 3 (10:05):
So the big the big next steps are I'm trying
to scale shrink this quite a bit to where it
would be far more portable and easier for a consumer
to carry around. And then from there also just dropping
the cost to where I could easily go into people's homes.
That was that's those are my key plans for this device,
in particular.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
How much how much what's the cost associated with this prototype?
Like how much would this device cost as is now?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
So as of now for this setup, I were to
make a hundred of them, that would be seventy five dollars.
But for I have a plan laid out to where
there's there's a solution. I can put this onto a
printed circuit board, which would make this all one singular piece,
and that would bring the price down to roughly thirty
(10:52):
five dollars. But I'm looking forward to in the future
reach your price, stager, maybe twenty dollars cool.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Right, Like I don't yeah, I just think about do
you have it in the supermarket where people can I
don't know, or does everybody have their own and check
it out? Really really cool? One thing I want to
ask you. We often talk with folks about the importance
of STEM education and companies, whether it's they're out in
Silicon Valley or thinking about the next generation of workers
that they need. Is this part of why three M
(11:22):
is looking to do this?
Speaker 5 (11:23):
Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean we have a we if
we seek to educate or reach out to folks about
science and how it's integral part of our life. We
have a great science advocacy team if within three them
as well. And that's also one of the reasons why
during this program we get to meet young brilliant minds
(11:47):
like him, and we try our best to like I say,
nurture and mold them and inspire them to do something
like he said, like science is part of it. Merging
with the society. That's another huge thing that we see.
So what he's doing pretty close society bigger, Yeah, society better.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
That's what we hope for the bigger impact. Srich congratulations,
sabash Aditya benergi A three M guys, thank you so much.
This is Bloomberg
Hosts And Creators
Tim Stenovec
Carol Massar
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.