I'm Shashank Madala, a student at Robbinsville High School in Robbinsville, New Jersey, class of 2027. Almost everything I work on ends up in the same place: machine learning, pointed at the parts of human behavior that are hard to measure.
Kora started with my autistic cousin. I founded it and built it for him, leading a team of three developers: an AI app that reads emotional cues and gives caregivers something they can act on. It supports 700+ users across 25 therapy centers in 12 countries, and it won the 2025 Congressional App Challenge for New Jersey's 10th district, announced by the office of U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver.
Lumin AI is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit I founded and now run as co-CEO. It makes AI education free: a 20-module curriculum, completion certificates, and chapters run by students. 15,000+ students taught, 5,200+ certificates issued, 50+ chapter locations across 16+ countries, and a 125+ intern team behind it.
At the Yale Child Study Center I am a research intern in the Cha Lab, modeling autism-related social communication from real parent and child interaction video, audio and pose data. My first-author paper was accepted at IEEE MIT URTC 2026. It looks at a released model that scores autism severity from a child's speech. The model never sees the recording, only a randomly drawn, arbitrarily ordered summary of it, and drawing that summary twice moves the score by a standard deviation of 0.385 ADOS-2 points. An order-invariant model with 365x fewer parameters removes the part that comes from the ordering. I present it at MIT on October 10, 2026.
The rest, briefly. I represented the USA at the 2026 International Economics Olympiad in Shenzhen, where Team USA placed 6th of 52 countries in the business case competition. I am president of the Robbinsville FBLA chapter and spent two years on the New Jersey FBLA State Technology Committee. I write software for FRC Team 2590 Nemesis, Curie Division winners at the 2024 FIRST World Championship. Along the way: USACO Gold Division and the Presidential Volunteer Service Award at the Gold level twice.
Coverage has run in Trenton Journal, NJBIZ, India-West, New Jersey Stage, The Global Indian, INDIA New England News, TheUNN, Lokvani, TAPinto, CanvasRebel and ITV Gold, plus the Yale School of Medicine profile, the announcement from Rep. McIver's office, and a byline in Autism Spectrum News. Every piece is linked below.
