Nikki Figueroa Czarnobaj
Former Hills Road student Nikki is a professional guitarist, performing with a range of acclaimed artists and appearing on national television.
Nandha Sethiaseelan
About
Year 13 Nandha worked on a voice modelling project at Cambridge Judge Business School.
Year 13 student Nandha Sethiaseelan has contributed to an innovative artificial intelligence research project supporting an indigenous community in India.
Nandha worked alongside researchers from IIIT Dharwad and the Frugal AI Hub at Cambridge Judge Business School developing a voice AI system for a small indigienous community.
Alongside his studies in Economics and Maths, Nandha is a student mentor and leads the Economics and Business Society at Hills Road. As part of an internship at the Cambridge Judge Business School, he has worked on a project to develop a language voice model for the Soliga community in Karnataka.
The Soliga language is entirely spoken, with no written form and no existing digital speech tools. Despite this, the team successfully built a working model using just five hours of recorded speech. The system is designed to operate without internet access or cloud computing, instead running on small, low-cost devices.
To ensure the community retained full control of their data, the project used a technique called federated learning, where the AI is trained locally and only small updates are shared, rather than the recordings themselves. The research is currently under submission to an academic conference, marking an exciting next step for the project.
Congratulations, Nandha, for this incredible piece of work!
