A Panda Named Pico: The Award-Winning AI Two New Razorbacks Built

On a Chromebook screen in a Bentonville classroom, a cartoon panda blinks and waits. 

It does not interrupt. It does not get tired.

When a child who stutters needs 10 seconds to finish a sentence, the panda listens first, then answers patiently. 

Its name is Pico, and it was built by two teenagers who understood, better than most adults, why that patience matters. 

For Sanjay Shreeyans Javangula, the why was personal. Growing up, he watched his cousin with autism whose stutter sometimes made it difficult for other children to understand him, and harder still to make friends. Javangula kept arriving at the same stubborn problem. 

The only way his cousin would get more comfortable talking was to practice talking, and the only place to practice was with the friends he did not yet have. 

"The only way to get him to make more friends is to give him more practice with his speech," Javangula said. 

That idea became ExpressBuddy, the platform he and Soham Shekhar started as a summer project in 2025 and refined over their senior year. This spring it took first place in software design, one of the fair's 22 categories, at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, where they were up against the best young researchers from more than 60 countries. 

They both arrived at the U of A this fall as honors students studying computer science. 

Neither had a class or a club pushing them. What they had was time. Both were in Ignite Professional Studies, Bentonville's career accelerator, which gives students three class periods instead of one for their own projects and internships. That open stretch of the day is what let them track down speech pathologists, run a classroom pilot and keep building. 

The Northwest Arkansas Regional Science and Engineering Fair, which has sent Northwest Arkansas students to the international competition since 1951, marked its 75th anniversary at the U of A this year. 

Shawn Bell, who directed the regional fair for eight years, said a first-place category finish at the international level is something Northwest Arkansas had not done in recent memory. 

A Raccoon in a Hoodie 

Pico did not start as a panda. Shekhar, who handled much of the design, first sketched a raccoon in a hoodie. It did not feel right. A panda did. 

"We thought a panda would be a much more friendly face," Shekhar said. "That's where Pico came from." 

The friendly face sits on top of serious engineering. ExpressBuddy runs on Google's Gemini, the same model Bentonville schools already use, but the students layered their own system on top. They researched therapeutic methods for supporting children with autism and built that guidance into the prompt, and gave Pico what Javangula calls tools, agentic abilities that let it remember a child's interests across conversations and, when something suggests harm, alert a teacher. 

The harder problems were invisible.  

The children ExpressBuddy was designed to support were often not using high-end MacBooks but less-expensive Chromebooks in real classrooms, where ordinary background noise posed an additional technical challenge. 

The best tools for cleaning up audio and sensing when a child had finished speaking were too heavy for that hardware, so the two wrote their own signal processing that recognized a wider range of speech patterns, including isolating stuttering amid background noise, giving a child who needed extra seconds the room to finish. 

"It really required a lot of engineering from its normal idea to the classroom," Javangula said. "The classroom has its own challenges." 

Building AI Guardrails 

What sets the project apart may be how much of that engineering went into restraint. When their pilot data showed children using Pico 40 to 50 minutes a day, far more than the 15 they had expected, they added a 20-minute daily cap to head off dependence.  

They wrote grounding into the avatar itself, so a child who got too attached would be reminded that Pico is a website, not a friend, and encouraged to seek out real ones. Javangula compares it to a batting cage. You practice there, then you go play the game. 

"We wanted to make sure that whatever we create is actually safe," Shekhar said, pointing to news reports of children growing dependent on AI.  

He noted that neurodivergent children can be especially vulnerable to that kind of dependence.   

The design drew scrutiny early. When the district superintendent saw a demonstration, she came back the next week with a school board member, Javangula said, and tested it herself, steering a conversation toward self-harm to see how Pico would respond. It redirected the exchange and flagged a teacher. Satisfied, she opened the door to a district conference of more than 25 speech-language pathologists, one of whom asked to try Pico with a student. That became the pilot. 

The clearest proof came at the end of the year. One student, Shekhar said, had used Pico to think through a Mother's Day gift, then to navigate peer pressure and bullying in the cafeteria. 

"That's kind of when I really saw real impact," he said. "Even if it's just one student, that's still a lot." 

Real Classrooms, Real Children 

The road to Phoenix was not a straight line. An entry in the Congressional App Challenge went nowhere, and a Samsung Solve for Tomorrow run won Bentonville schools a $10,000 technology grant. Only late in the year did they enter the regional fair, win it and earn the ticket to the international competition, where they did not expect to place at all. The projects beside them looked more professional. Then the judges read the categories, fourth through second, without calling their names. 

"We thought we're probably not going to place first at all," Shekhar said. "But they called our name, and it was just an amazing experience." 

Their theory of why they won is simple. Most projects stayed in the lab. Theirs had been in real classrooms with children. 

Keeping the Talent in Arkansas 

For Bell, their win caps a climb. 

Northwest Arkansas students placed fourth at the international fair in 2023 and third in 2025 before this year's first, and last year's competitor is now studying engineering at the U of A. 

Bell spent 18 years teaching middle-school science before moving into workforce development, and keeping students like these in the state is, to him, the whole point. 

"That is talent, that is pure talent, and it's here," Bell said. "We don't want it to go anywhere else." 

Both students chose the U of A over schools that would have taken them, Shekhar for a campus close to home he already knew from ISEF and the HogHacks hackathon, Javangula for the Bodenhamer Fellowship and the opportunity building up around Northwest Arkansas. 

"The Bodenhamer Fellowship showed me that I could stay in Arkansas while still pursuing ambitious research and building technology with a real impact," Javangula said. 

For Shekhar, the lesson outlasted the trophy. "It's about the people that you're helping," he said. "You have to be people first." 

That belief is why the two are not done. Rather than sell ExpressBuddy, they plan to open-source it, so any teacher or district can use it for free. 

Javangula put the reason more plainly. 

"We wanted to build something that gives every kid a way to find their voice." 

About the College of Engineering:  The University of Arkansas College of Engineering is the state's largest engineering school, offering graduate and undergraduate degrees, online studies and interdisciplinary programs. It enrolls more than 4,700 students and employs more than 150 faculty and researchers along with nearly 200 staff members. Its research enterprise generated $47 million in new research awards in Fiscal Year 2025. The college's strategic plan, Vision 2035, seeks to build the premier STEM workforce in accordance with three key objectives: Initiating lifelong student success, generating transformational and relevant knowledge, and becoming the destination of choice among educators, students, staff, industry, alumni and the community. As part of this, the college is increasing graduates and research productivity to expand its footprint as an entrepreneurial engineering platform serving Arkansas and the world. The college embraces its pivotal role in driving economic growth, fueling innovation and educating the next generation of engineers, computer scientists and data scientists to address current and future societal challenges.