An Upper Darby student was honored at the White House for a proposal to use AI to fight human trafficking

As a student at Upper Darby High School, Khandakar Mahin was intrigued when the school installed a weapons detection system two years ago.

Mahin, who was interested in the artificial intelligence behind the system, wrote email newsletters to the student body, describing how it worked.

“I had fun doing that,” describing “how AI algorithms were working on a microscopic level,” Mahin said.

Now an Upper Darby graduate, Mahin, 18, was honored at the White House earlier this month for a proposal he created for another use for AI: to combat human trafficking.

First lady Melania Trump praised Mahin and the other five winning teams of the inaugural Presidential AI Challenge at a June 9 ceremony.

“You saw AI’s potential and created ideas that will shape America’s future in many areas, including healthcare, nutrition, public safety, and beyond,” Trump told the winners, who were chosen from a field of 20,000.

Mahin — who said he got to see the Oval Office and “network with many different types of people” — won for a proposal to use computer vision to match photos from the dark web to a database of 64,000 hotels.

The tool would identify details like carpet designs or headboard features in photos depicting trafficking, then match them to known hotels, using images scraped from the internet. Mahin created a framework and demonstration of the tool, and said his proposal included ideas for how it could be scaled to be used by law enforcement nationwide.

The award, which Mahin said came with a $22,500 prize, was yet another achievement for Mahin, who will attend Harvard University this fall; he was also accepted to Yale and Princeton.

While at Upper Darby High School, he took 16 Advanced Placement classes and won an array of awards and scholarships, including being selected for the Amazon Future Engineers and the Disney Dreamers Academy earlier this year.

“This is a very bright kid who’s been looking into things like this for a long time,” said Dan McGarry, the superintendent of the Upper Darby School District.

Mahin immigrated to the United States with family from Bangladesh 12 years ago and has attended Upper Darby schools since then.

Mahin has been “heavily invested in being a contributor in a positive way to his school community,” McGarry said, noting that the recent graduate was involved in setting up local libraries. “It’s not just artificial intelligence. He’s also a good kid.”

But Mahin has a particular interest in AI. Mahin, who recently served as a student representative on Upper Darby’s school board, was among a group of students who joined school leaders in meeting with company representatives about the weapons detection system.

The students made a video about the system, which McGarry said was critical in getting student buy-in.

The district also sends students to the Delaware County Intermediate Unit to share their perspectives; Mahin has addressed other superintendents about AI, “the good and the bad,” McGarry said.

At Harvard, Mahin hopes to study political science and government with an aim toward creating “more ethical AI policies,” he said.

Mahin, who has already participated in programs at Princeton and MIT, credits teachers in Upper Darby — not just in computer science and math, but English, he said — with teaching him “how to have the grit to do research.” His award-winning AI project was supervised by Roseann Burns, an Upper Darby teacher who McGarry said works with gifted students.

Despite being an underfunded district, Upper Darby “has a lot of opportunities,” Mahin said. “As a student, you really have to seek out the opportunities if you really want it.”

While Mahin may stand out for the level of recognition he has received, McGarry said Upper Darby has many “amazingly talented, bright” students.

“That’s often overlooked, unfortunately,” McGarry said. He said Mahin “represents what I think makes this country great. … Every opportunity that was there, he took it.”