SYSTEMS CHANGE SUMMIT
International Youth-Led Summit Series
Grant Wang
Founder,
ADG Voice
Grant Wang is currently a junior at Williamsville East High School, based in the United States. Through an interdisciplinary approach integrating linguistics, social sciences, and natural sciences, he has founded several social innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives to address the issues of education equity and social justice.
These initiatives include a youth volunteering organization, a free tutoring program for underprivileged children, social media platforms and a website dedicated to spreading awareness of refugees, as well as a project to automatically detect and delete cyberbullying on social media.
One of his most inspired moments in life came about when he volunteered to help teach refugees English at Journey’s End, a nonprofit organization that helps refugees resettle in Buffalo. While speaking with them, he heard their touching, but shocking stories about the hardships they faced in their home countries and challenges they are facing when resettling in the US. They didn’t have the freedom to choose where and what kind of life to live! He realized that what they need most is acceptance and friendship, rather than just financial support. This motivated him to found ADG Voice, a nonprofit organization to spread awareness around the world of refugees in order to reduce biases against them and provide them equal access to the resources in their new country.
On cyberbullying, Grant has been developing an AI-based method to automatically detect and delete cyberbullying using computational linguistics. In particular, his passion for linguistics started from hearing refugee stories, which sparked him to want to reduce the language barrier after resettlement in a new country. He believes that they shouldn’t have to go through any more discrimination after the hardships they dealt with in their home country.
He is passionate about improving communities locally and on a broader scale. At university, he would like to specialize in computational linguistics and use computational tools to address the issue in humanity and languages in specific.