A 17-year-old looked at drone footage of elephants, noticed that humans and elephants move differently, and built an AI system that catches poachers in real time for roughly the cost of a decent office chair. Anika Puri won $10,000 and a top prize at the world's largest pre-college STEM competition for it. She just graduated MIT with two degrees. The bar for the rest of us has been located, and it is very high.
The Problem Nobody Had Actually Solved
Elephant poaching is one of those issues that generates a lot of outrage and not nearly enough solutions. The ivory trade has been illegal for decades. Elephant hunting has been banned in India since the 1970s. And yet, as Good Good Good reports, the killing has continued, markets have stayed stocked, and the enforcement gap has gaped wide open.
Drones were already being used to monitor wildlife preserves. That part existed. The problem, as a teenage Puri spotted immediately, was that the footage was neither accurate nor timely enough to actually stop anything. A drone catching blurry thermal video of something moving in the dark is not the same as a drone that can tell you whether that something is an elephant or a human with a rifle.
Puri grew up traveling with her family to India and saw the ivory trade firsthand as a child. That image stuck. When she later got access to drone footage and started watching it, she saw something researchers with far more credentials had apparently overlooked: elephants and humans move completely differently. Speed, turning patterns, the whole physical grammar of how each species navigates space. It was obvious once someone pointed it out. She was the one who pointed it out.
What She Actually Built
EISa, which stands for Elephant Savior, is an AI-driven tool that attaches a $250 low-resolution thermal camera to a drone and uses infrared video to analyze movement patterns in real time. The system distinguishes between elephant movement and human movement as the drone flies over a park, flagging potential poachers on the spot rather than hours later when someone gets around to reviewing the tape.
Field testing showed better than 90% accuracy for human detection. For $250 in hardware that plugs into an iPhone. To be clear: existing government and conservation programs with vastly larger budgets had not cracked this. A high school junior from her bedroom did.
She submitted EISa to ISEF 2022, the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, which Good Good Good describes as the world's largest international pre-college STEM competition. She won the Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication, worth $10,000, and took a top prize in the earth and environmental sciences category. She told Smithsonian Magazine at the time that she was "honored just to be on that stage." The understatement is doing some heavy lifting there.
This Was Not Her First Rodeo
The poacher detector was not some one-off science fair miracle. Puri had already completed a summer program at Stanford's AI Lab before any of this. After high school, she worked as a research assistant at Harvard's Computational Health Informatics Center. She then enrolled at MIT, where she just graduated in June 2026 with dual bachelor's degrees in business management and in AI and computer science, according to Good Good Good.
She has held AI research and engineering internships at Goldman Sachs and Nvidia. She is currently part of the Bernard M. Gordon MIT Engineering Leadership Program. The through-line from a childhood trip to India to one of the most prestigious engineering programs in the country is not subtle.
What is worth sitting with is how she describes her relationship to AI itself. "Initially, my enthusiasm for artificial intelligence was based off of this limitless possibility for social good," she told Smithsonian Magazine in 2022. Then she learned about bias baked into AI systems by the people who build them. "It really has the capability to reinforce some of the worst aspects of our society," she said. That kind of clear-eyed reckoning with a field you love, at 17, is rarer than any prize she won.
Why This Story Matters Beyond the Feel-Good Headline
Elephant populations in Asia and Africa have been under sustained pressure from poaching for generations. Enforcement has been chronically underfunded, conservation organizations are stretched thin, and the economics of the ivory black market remain brutal. Technology has been offered as a partial solution for years, but the implementation gap between "we have drones" and "we can actually stop a poaching event" has remained stubbornly wide.
Puri's approach is genuinely different because it is cheap, real-time, and scalable. A $250 camera and an iPhone is not a solution that requires a grant cycle or a government procurement process. Whether EISa has been deployed in any systematic way beyond the competition is, as Good Good Good notes, unclear from available reporting. That gap between a brilliant proof of concept and actual field deployment is its own story, and probably not a flattering one for the institutions that should be funding this.
The conservation community, various government wildlife agencies, and the tech companies pouring billions into AI applications for advertising and content moderation might want to take a look at what a 17-year-old built for the price of a week of groceries and ask themselves some uncomfortable questions about priorities.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the pace of progress on wildlife conservation is limited by the complexity of the problem. That poaching persists because it is deeply entrenched, economically motivated, and technically difficult to combat. A teenager built a working counter-system with a $250 thermal camera and an iPhone. The complexity argument has taken some damage.
The part of this story that deserves more attention than it usually gets is what Puri said about AI and bias. She built something genuinely good, then immediately started interrogating the limitations of the tool and the responsibility of who gets to build it. That is not a typical 17-year-old's instinct. It is barely a typical adult's instinct in a field that has spent the last decade loudly insisting that it is saving the world while quietly optimizing engagement metrics. The self-awareness she showed in 2022 is exactly what the industry that will presumably employ her has been chronically missing.
Where EISa actually ended up, whether it is protecting any elephants right now, whether any conservation organization picked it up and ran with it, those are the questions that should be making someone uncomfortable. Puri did her part. The follow-through is on everyone else.
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