Anika Puri, now a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, got her start in STEM from an early age. In fact, when she was 17, she was awarded the Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in 2022 for an invention that was inspired by her childhood trips to India. Growing up, Puri traveled with her family to India, where she saw the ongoing illegal trade of ivory, markets flush with products that came from the trafficking and killing of elephants. Although the ivory trade has been illegal for decades and elephant hunting has been prohibited in India since the 1970s, the problem has persisted. “I was quite taken aback,” Puri told Smithsonian Magazine when she was 17. “Because I always thought, ‘well, poaching is illegal, how come it really is still such a big issue?’” She discovered that drones were used to detect and capture footage of poachers, but that they lacked accuracy and timeliness. But that footage did provide a eureka moment. After watching videos of elephants and humans, Puri noticed that the two species moved in vastly different ways, with delineations in speed, turning patterns, and other motions. “I realized that we could use this disparity between these two movement patterns in order to actually increase the detection accuracy of potential poachers,” she told the magazine. So, she invented EISa (short for elephant savior), a low-cost, artificial intelligence-driven tool that uses thermal and infrared videos to detect movement patterns as a drone captures real-time footage to distinguish more accurately between elephants and potential poachers. The device uses a $250 low-resolution thermal camera that can plug into an iPhone. Once attached to a drone, the system gives real-time insights as it flies over a park. Field testing showed that Puri’s invention was able to detect humans with over 90% accuracy. Puri submitted her project to ISEF 2022, the world’s largest international...