***** Vol.3 Chap.1 A break through *****

Early spring, 2005 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Professor Abdulcizi!”

After knocking loudly on the office door, JB shouted excitedly and peered into the keyhole to see if there was anyone in the office.

Inside, the attention of the occupant, sitting on a soft executive chair behind an old wooden desk filled with papers and magazines, seemed to be elsewhere. The face was worn and tired, with deep lines around the eyes, the hair with patches of whitish gray and whatever was left was slightly shuffled, though well combed, but the hairline appeared to be receding. While the body was towards the monitor, the eyes were blank and fixed on the vast nothing outside the window.

“PROFESSOR ABDULCIZI! PROFESSOR ABDULCIZI!” JB was getting very impatient.

She knocked loudly again on the door and shouted into the keyhole. In fact, the force of her knock caused the nameplate on the door, engraved with ‘Frank Abdulcizi, Ph.D. The George W. Smith Professor of Computer Science,’ to come unglued and fell. Gingerly, she picked it up and stuck it back on the door.

Wow! JB smiled longingly as she pictured herself occupying the chair in that office behind that door.

Someday soon! She consoled herself.

Inside the room, Frank was reminiscing with his childhood sweetheart, frolicking in the warm Egyptian sand. He remembered how they were laughing and playing hide and seek around the Sphinx, how they sat on top of the Sphinx after all the tourists had left and fantasized about the clouds making imaginary animal stories, and how they would come down to the front of the Sphinx making sand figures.

Ah, those were the happy days! He said to himself as he savored the memories. Somehow there was a subliminal draw towards his childhood land.

Outside the office door, JB was getting very antsy now. She rattled the doorknob and shouted again into the keyhole.

“PROFESSOR ABDULCIZI! I’ve done it! I have a viable model!”

A gentle stir inside the room. The occupant, aroused by the noisy racket, had to put aside those happy memories and come back to the present. A dove flew by the window, squawking loudly outside the window. Still with a dazed look on the face and with great reluctance, Frank slowly returned to reality, to the mundane chores, to another interruption, to another meeting.

Sigh!

The gentle ticking of the battery-operated clock sitting next to the monitor came alive as it marked the seconds flying by. Soft sunlight warmed the face. The dove flew for another circle, squawking a little louder this time. The great executive chair slowly swiveled back into position to face the door.

“Come in.”

Even before Frank’s last word was spoken, JB already burst into the room holding a stack of computer printouts. As she was approaching in haste, she knocked over the wastepaper basket that was resting innocently next to the grand desk and kicked the basket out of her way.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She could not hold her tongue nor contain her excitement any longer. Looking excitedly at her supervising Professor who seemed to have a hard time gathering himself back together, she exploded with excitement.

“Look, look! The generative AI program I wrote had produced a model!” she exclaimed excitedly, as if she had ten cups of coffee coursing through her system. She probably did.

She threw the papers down on top of everything else on the desk and flipped over the pages and move her fingers over the numbers, talking a mile a minute. Then, out of nowhere, she fished out two crudely plotted graphs with no headings, no labels, just a curve on each paper.

She could have gone on and on except her professor presently raised his hand and stopped her.

“Wait!” Frank stopped his post-doc from getting overly excited. “One of these days, you’ve got to learn how to talk like a normal human being rather than a geek. Consider this as a part of your post-doc training. You, mind as well, begin now. Start from the beginning and tell me the entire story in two minutes or fewer in layperson’s terms, please.”

She took a deep breath.

“I have programmed my AI neural net to generate a model to predict persons with aggressive behavior based on all parts of the person’s DNA genome collected from the penitentiaries across the country. By stripping out the parts of the DNA that were deemed irrelevant as we talked last time, and using all the rest of the DNA sequence, I now have a viable model to identify those individuals with aggressive tendencies.”

To a layperson, this was still total gibberish. Frank surmised. Well, it was a start anyway.

Frank remembered three years ago, he collaborated with Dr. Margaret Tomash at the Department of Genetics of the Medical School, studying the effects of DNA expressions and corresponding observed behavior. It was fortuitous that the government had mandated that the DNA information of all inmates be collected. This information was subsequently released without identification for research. The team immediately applied to the government for the use of this data.

Two years ago, Frank attended the International Conference on Computational Intelligence and heard JB talk about her dissertation on generative artificial intelligence (AI), a new and emerging area of computer science that was at the fore front of automatic programming, the epitome of machine intelligence. He saw the potential of such programming. Immediately after JB’s talk, he wasted no time to invite her to come to his research laboratory to work on the human genome project.

Being fresh out of the doctoral program, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work with a prominent scientist in the field. But in JB’s eyes, first she saw the glory of herself receiving the Nobel prize as being the pioneer in cracking the human genome encoding from the behavioral perspective. The job was secondary. Then she saw the dollar sign by being at the forefront of computer science research. Finally, she saw power from gaining such notoriety.

It took a total of three whole seconds for her to agree. So, packing up her computer, she headed for Pittsburgh right after the final defense of her doctoral dissertation.

With the addition of JB to the research team, Frank and Margaret immediately made great strides in identifying portions of the DNA sequence that might be related to aggressive behavior.

“So, the program generated a viable model?” Frank asked nonchalantly.

“By combining all the snippets of different DNA sequences, the artificial neural net selected multiple portions to give a decent prediction of whether the person would be susceptible to aggressive behavior or not.”

“That is excellent. How accurate was the prediction?”

“About 60% presently.”

Just then, the phone rang.

“Dr. Abdulcizi?”

“Yes?”

“This is the office calling. You have an anxious doctoral student here waiting for you to come to his doctoral defense. The committee has been waiting for over fifteen minutes already!”

“Oops! I will be down immediately.” Frank hung up the phone.

Absent-minded professor, Frank mumbled to himself.

“JB, we are late for Mark’s doctoral defense! Let’s go. But call Margaret first and see if she can come over for a working dinner tonight at six in my office and we will go over your results then.”

Without another word, Frank left the office and rushed to the conference room, where a nervous student was pacing back and forth.