Browsing his way to the top

Since 16-year-old student Adnan Osmani won the Young Scientist of the Year competition, he has been critically acclaimed by technology experts, and his computer browser is creating a furore in Internet discussion groups. He talks to Karlin Lillington

At 5:30 a.m. on a bitterly cold Tuesday morning in early January, Mullingar student Adnan Osmani climbed alone into the early bus to Dublin, lugging his laptop and a two-page printout of a project in which he'd invested two years of his 16-year-old life.

He'd had only two hours sleep, a result of trying to organise himself amid the mayhem of a move into a new house, putting some last-minute finishing touches to his project and general anxiety. Arriving in Dublin, he headed out to the RDS. There, he joined the bustle of hundreds of other teenagers as they set up carefully-planned booths explaining their entries to the Esat/BT Young Scientist of the Year competition. Adnan simply stuck his two pages on the booth, opened his laptop, and waited.

He could hardly, in his wildest imaginings, have guessed at what would happen next. By the following week, tens of thousands of people around the world would flood Internet search engines with three search terms: "Adnan", "Osmani" and "Xwebs". He would make radio and television appearances, including the Late Late Show. And out in the virtual world of the Internet, on some of the biggest programmer discussion sites, such as Slashdot.org, and in Ireland on Boards.ie, he would be the subject of angry debates, long pontifications, and hopeful postings as thousands debated how the browser might work; indeed, if it could work at all.

Osmani had won the title of 2003 Young Scientist of the Year with a web browser - a means of navigating the Internet - called Xwebs that judges felt showed the assuredness and programming capability of the very best final year university students. But what caught the attention of the web world was Osmani's claim that he'd coded an algorithm into the browser that enabled it to speed up browsing by up to six times.

"I just wanted it faster, for myself," says Osmani simply. "I wanted to make the perfect browser." Osmani is mostly oblivious to the web furore he has caused - he doesn't really like discussion sites ("they can make you over-confident or destroy your confidence"), and has also been advised not to read them at the moment.

Which is a good idea, as the majority of comments are sceptical and often downright brutal - mostly coming from adult men in the technology industry who seem to have forgotten that Osmani is only 16, and the browser is a school project, not a submission to an international journal by a boastful professional researcher.

But his programming precocity and finesse is undoubted, say the industry and academic judges for the Young Scientist competition. Indeed, such was its demonstration of accomplishment that three additional judges with computing expertise were called in to view it, to make sure that Osmani did indeed have the ability to write a program so complex and comprehensive.

"The student certainly displayed enough knowledge to prove he'd written it himself," says UCD's Dr John Dunnion, one of the additional judges and a computer science lecturer. "And it certainly is a very impressive piece of technology, a very feature-rich browser."

"What impressed us most of all," says Dr Leonard Hobbs,Intel head of engineering and competition judge, "is he absolutely knew what he was doing. It was a complete work, a whole." What Osmani was demonstrating, he says, "is the science of the web." Numerous judges have emphasised that the panel decided early on that it would not include the speed claims as a feature for assessment, as they could not be verified. In other words, the browser won on the strength of all its other elements.

Dr Gary McDarby, a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab Europe, says he was astonished at the ability shown by the 16-year-old. "Years ahead," he says. He is unsure whether the speed claims could be commercially implemented, but he believes Osmani's algorithm would probably work and, overall, notes that the browser shows new and creative ways of thinking about browser applications. "What he's certainly doing conceptually is raising the bar for the commercial companies."

Osmani, who decribes Xwebs as "a megabrowser", spent two years producing about 200,000 lines of code for his project that folds in direct, browser-based access to 120 search engines and contains five popular media players for sound and video. He also added a DVD player that can be enlarged to fill the screen or miniaturised into a small window. And it has a talking character named Phoebe, who welcomes you by name at start-up, guides the user through some of the processes of the browser and can read a web page out loud for children or the sight-impaired. The browser is structured on the basic form of Microsoft's Internet Explorer that developers would use to create add-ons for the browser, or programs that work with it.

Osmani is sitting in the dining room of his large, comfortable home in Mullingar, a house still full of boxes from the family's recent move. Half Arab and half Indian - his immigrant parents are both consulting doctors, in paediatrics and obstetrics - Osmani is the antithesis of the weedy programmer stereotype: solid and broad for his age, with a shock of dyed-blond hair, a bit wary and shy, but charmingly polite.

A plasterer arrives at the house and, breaking off a chat with Osmani's father Suvi, peers in at Osmani. "Is this the man?" he asks. "Let me shake your hand!" Osmani looks acutely embarrassed, but also shyly pleased as he stretches out an arm.

SUVI Osmani is full of pride and enthusiasm for his son, but is clearly bewildered by this child who speaks in an alien tongue about things he barely comprehends. Adnan's oddly American-accented voice speaks in the language of bits and bytes, algorithms, caches and protocols that makes no sense to his father.

He looks on with a vaguely shocked expression as his son eagerly dives into conversation about computing and programming and the digital personalities of various computer operating systems, and vigorously sketches out diagrams, boxes and arrows that show how his browser actually works. Suvi Osmani admits that he hardly knew how to use the Internet until Adnan showed him how to use the Google search engine to see how his son was being written about out on the web.

Adnan Osmani got his first computer at 10 (now passed along to his younger sister), and began to teach himself to program at 12. He's entirely self-taught - none of his schools ever had computing classes, he says with exasperation.

Programming - along with writing fiction and poetry and drawing - seems to have filled a friendship gap for him as well. He has been moved around to various Irish towns with his parents as they completed their medical training, and thus has changed schools several times. "You don't have time to make friends," he says. "Some people integrate better with machines than people, I guess."

Yet Osmani is in no way socially awkward - no more so than any teenage boy. He's voluble and cheerful, clearly has a deep, curious intelligence, and is absolutely passionate about computing and programming. He's read all the hip cyberpunk writers that produce literary cyber-fiction, lighting up as the conversation touches upon Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. He also loves reading the classics and poetry, he says. "Not modern stuff. That's all guys writing on something like, a cup. It's boring."

Only a 16-year-old can obliterate decades of contemporary writing with such aplomb. His computing heroes are Apple Computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick.

For now, Osmani is going through the long process of seeing if he has done something that he can copyright or patent, and is enjoying the attention, even though he says he never expected to get the top prize. At most, he thought he might get something in the technology subsection, but when that didn't happen he wasn't really paying attention when they called out his name for the Young Scientist award. "I just thought you'd better get up and start walking because you've won something. I didn't really know what," he says. He hopes the award will help him get into a good university, with Harvard his aim.

As for programmers and programming? "We like doing what we're doing, and it's great if you can get recognition."