A 12-year-old middle school student had a paper officially accepted at a conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), drawing attention in scientific circles in a case that came to light only later. The student used vibe coding with artificial intelligence services to demonstrate an entirely new technical concept.
According to scientific circles on the 26th, a paper by Antarip Chakraborty, a 12-year-old American middle school student, was officially accepted at the Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA) 2026, held last month in Qingdao, China. Founded in 1994, RTCSA is regarded as one of the world's most prestigious conferences in embedded and real-time systems. Chakraborty attended the conference as the youngest paper author in RTCSA's history.
Chakraborty's paper was titled "Real-Time Systems Sonification." Sonification is a technique that converts data into sound. While sonification has been used steadily to represent scientific data as sound and for some educational purposes, no research had applied it to real-time systems. Chakraborty's study was the first to propose a sonification technique linking tasks in a real-time system to piano keys, so that a key is played each time a task runs. He also demonstrated his sonification technology at the conference in Qingdao last month.
The biggest factor that allowed Chakraborty, a middle school student like any other his age, to write the paper himself was AI. In a written interview with Seoul Economic Daily, Chakraborty said he loves music enough to have studied piano for five years but had never once thought he would write a paper himself. "I started working on the paper casually, at the suggestion of my father, who is a professor," he said. "Thanks to generative AI, I was able to experiment with different sonification approaches without having to write out long stretches of program code myself."
"When I received the email saying the paper had been accepted, I was nervous that researchers would ask difficult questions at the conference," he said. "But many researchers encouraged me, saying I should add new ideas to this year's paper, expand the research and try again at next year's RTCSA." Chakraborty said that after hearing the encouragement from senior researchers, he wants to attend next year's conference as well, pledging to continue his academic research.
