16-Year-Old Indian Girl's AI Company Launched In 2022 Now Valued At ₹ 100 Crore

Pranjali Awasthi, a 16-year-old Indian prodigy has made it into the technology world with her venture, Delv.AI, a startup dedicated to refining the process of data extraction for research. Ms Awasthi launched the company in January 2022 and has already raised $450,000 (Rs 3.7 crore) in funding. Ms Awasthi has a team of up to 10 employees.

Her journey with technology started young, and she has credited her father, an engineer as the primary source of inspiration for her entrepreneurial journey. She told Business Insider that her father's passion and values encouraged her to get into coding when she was 7.

She told the media outlet that she moved to Florida with family at age 11 from India and the world of computer science and competitive math opened up for her.

At the age of 13, she started interning in university research labs at Florida Internal University working on machine learning projects alongside going to school. During COVID, she used to intern for about 20 hours a week because her school had gone virtual.

During her internship days, she started thinking about how AI could solve the problem and the idea of Delv.AI came about.

In 2021, Pranjali won a place at an AI startup accelerator in Miami, facilitated by tech enthusiasts Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot from Backend Capital. She was accepted into their September 12-week cohort in exchange for a small piece of her future company.

She momentarily stepped away from high school. The accelerator became the launchpad and helped her in attracting investments from prominent names including On Deck and Village Global.

She explained that Delv.AI's primary objective is to aid researchers in accessing specific information within the realm of online content. Delv.AI raised $450,000 (approximately ₹ 3.7 crore) in funding and currently boasts an approximate valuation of $12 million (Rs 100 crore).

Norwegian Author Jon Fosse Wins Nobel Prize For Literature

STOCKHOLM, Oct 5: Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable," the award-giving body said on Thursday.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million).

Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in literature, science and peace have been awarded since 1901, becoming a career pinnacle in the fields.

The economics prize is a later addition established by the Swedish central bank.

Alongside the peace prize, literature has often drawn the most attention, and controversy, thrusting lesser known authors into the global spotlight as well as lifting book sales for well-established literary super stars.

Over the years, the literature prize has also picked winners well beyond the novelist tradition, including playwrights, historians, philosophers and poets, even breaking new ground with the award to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016.

Last year's Nobel was won by one of the main favourites, author Annie Ernaux, for her largely autobiographical books examining memory and social inequality, making her the first French woman to win the world's most prestigious literary award.

Katalin Kariko, Drew Weissman Get Nobel Prize For Medicine

STOCKHOLM, Oct 2: Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines.

The pair, who had been tipped as favourites, "contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times," the jury said.

In honouring the pair this year, the Nobel committee in Stockholm broke with its usual practice of honouring decades-old research.

While the prize-winning science dates back to 2005, the first vaccines to use the mRNA technology were those made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna against Covid-19.

Kariko of Hungary and Weissman of the United States, longstanding colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, have won a slew of awards for their research, including the prestigious Lasker Award in 2021, often seen as a precursor to the Nobel.

Unlike traditional vaccines which use a weakened virus or a key piece of the virus' protein, mRNA vaccines provide the genetic molecules that tell cells what proteins to make, which simulates an infection and trains the immune system for when it encounters the real virus.

The idea was first demonstrated in 1990, but it wasn't until the mid-2000s that Weissman and Kariko developed a technique to control a dangerous inflammatory response seen in animals exposed to these molecules, opening the way to develop safe human vaccines.

Kariko's and Weissman's mRNA technology is now being used to develop other treatments for diseases and illnesses such as cancer, influenza and heart failure.

The pair will receive their Nobel prize, consisting of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1 million cheque, from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

Last year, the Medicine Prize went to Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal and discovered the previously unknown hominin Denisova.

Peace Prize to Iranian women?

The Nobel season continues this week with the announcement of the winners of the Physics Prize on Tuesday and the Chemistry Prize on Wednesday.

They will be followed by the much-anticipated prizes for Literature on Thursday and Peace on Friday.

The awards, first handed out in 1901, were created by Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel in his will to celebrate those who have "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

Criticism over a lack of gender and geographical diversity has plagued the Nobels over the years.

US-based men have dominated the science fields, while women account for just six percent of overall laureates -- something the various award committees insist they are addressing.

Among the names making the rounds for Thursday's Literature Prize are Russian author and outspoken Putin critic Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue, British author Salman Rushdie, Caribbean-American writer Jamaica Kincaid and Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse.

But for the Peace Prize, experts have been scratching their heads over possible winners, as conflicts rage around the globe.

Some have pointed to the Iranian women protesting since the death in custody a year ago of Mahsa Amini, arrested for violating Iran's strict dress code imposed on women.

Others suggest organisations documenting war crimes in Ukraine, or the International Criminal Court, which could one day be called upon to judge them.

"I think that climate change is a really good focus for the Peace Prize this year," Dan Smith, the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told AFP after a year of extreme weather around the world.

For Tuesday's Physics Prize, twisted graphene or the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica have been seen as possible winners, as well as the development of high-density data storage in the field of spintronics.