WILLIAMSVILLE, N.Y. (WKBW) — A Williamsville East High School student is fighting back against cyberbullying by using an app created to limit any offensive language.
17-year-old Grant Wang is an inventor of the “ML Offense App” that was created two years ago after the death of his close friend.
“Tragically losing a friend due to cyberbullying, I wanted to combat the issue of offensive language on social media," says Wang.
Wang says the name of his invention can have two meanings.
“So ML can stand for machine learning or it can stand for multilingual, so my project is multilingual,” he explains. “It works in 100 different languages, and it’s also a machine learning model.”
Wang explained more about how it works.
“If we input the multilingual sentence look at 'aqlow' meaning a miser in Chinese and clicked predict,” he says. “We get that this sentence is offensive and targets an individual.”
Wang’s hard work has paid off.
He’s one of the 40 finalists who will compete at a national science competition in Washington D.C.
Each finalist will receive $25,000.
The top ten will receive from $40,000 to $250,000.
“Social media is becoming more of a problem in other ways, and I think social media in a way can be controlled better,” he shares. “You can use it as a plugin so social media users can choose to implement the plugin to filter out offensive posts for their mental health for example and this way it’s not really affecting freedom of speech.
Wang says he had to do extensive research to make this idea so close to his heart a reality.
“I had to study tweets from 2022, and then I was able to see what percentage of tweets targets different ethnicities, races, and religions,” he says. “I think this application for this model can be used for endless different type of social science studies.”
And he says he hopes many others can find inspiration through this innovation.
“With rapid social media growth there are a lot of problems,” he says. “And I think that with more action like for example this model, I think that social media can be better handled.”
Wang will be showing off his model in a week-long competition from March 6 through March 13 in Washington D.C. in the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
