***** Vol.4 Chap.6 The first dataset *****
JB thought she was on her way to power earlier at the Institute, now to riches with her consulting on the side, and hopefully to glory soon.
Back to the office, she locked the door and could not wait to pull out the envelope, flipping it over and over and weighing it in her hands. As a poor college student, she had never handled so much cash before. Now this was all hers with promises for a lot more to come!
After the excitement subsided, she carefully opened the package with the letter opener.
Wow. A wad of brand new hundred-dollar bills fell out.
She brought the bills to her nose savoring the smell of the new bills. Fanning them in her hands, the sight of money caused her to forget every doubt she ever had about Dr. Schmidtiz and PPTSB. Holding so much money in her hand was exhilarating, and she comforted herself that there was much more to come.
Quickly putting the money back inside the envelope and into her desk drawer, she chided herself for getting so excited and promised not to spend that money until she had results.
But before embarking on this new project, the NSF proposal must be completed first.
First things first. She told herself. Grudgingly, she went to work on the proposal.
For the NSF proposal, she wanted to expand on the present research. Presently, she needed multiple DNA sequences for her generative AI neural net to correlate with violent behaviors. The non-specificity of the genetic input was not satisfactory. She wanted to narrow down the multiple DNA sequences to a few specific genes. Her proposal to NSF was to build on her success and refine the model.
With a lofty goal in view, the writing of the proposal was quickly completed and handed over to a work-study student who ran around gathering signatures from the Department Chair, the Dean, the Graduate office, the Research office, etc. She never knew and would not be bothered by so many hoops to jump through in gathering signatures.
After a few rounds of correction on the budget, she finally secured all the necessary signatures and she made sure that the research office took priority to send the proposal out to NSF in time. The entire process took the better part of her week. Now the much-anticipated weekend was here.
Anxiously, she breathed a sigh of relief and could not wait to get home to start on her consulting work. For once, she left the Institute before quitting time.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Unsure about the authenticity of the bills, she stopped by a bank to exchange a single hundred-dollar bill into smaller denominations. No problems were encountered at the bank.
Delighted, she picked up some Chinese takeout. Once home, the first order of business was to stash the rest of the money in a safe place.
After devouring her dinner, she could not wait to get into the laptop. The first thing that came up was a long, non-disclosure form that she had to sign and date at multiple locations.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. She breezed through all that formality, though not really reading all the fine prints. Where is the good stuff?
Surprisingly, signing the non-disclosure form unlocked the drive directory of the laptop. She bolted straight up to see what was on the drive but was totally disappointed that there was only a single spreadsheet on the drive with no names and no instructions, just a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers on it.
No tools existed on the laptop beyond the basic office suite. She spent the better part of the evening installing all the necessary AI software onto the laptop.
From her experience of working with other datasets, she could recognize some similarity between the numbers in this spreadsheet. Assuming what she thought was the ID on the first column and the genetic data on the rest of the data, she fed the data into her software and let the program do its job.
Relaxing on her comfy recliner, she reflected on the week’s whirlwind events.
Beginning with a visit from Jim telling her she was now an Adjunct Assistant Professor. Though the word ‘Adjunct’ annoyed her, but she understood the bureaucracy and knew that she needed not to waste time fighting for this battle. She knew she would be made Assistant Professor without the word Adjunct in no time.
She would rather fight to get the promotion to Professor without the word Assistant or Associate.
Gaining control over Frank’s classes, research programs, and students was a bonus. She had dealt with Mark Hymann, her nemesis. She had snowed Dr. Tomash and knew she would not be a problem from now on. In her pride, she saw no further need for Dr. Tomash at all, having outlived her usefulness. That minor problem could be dealt with easily later.
Beep, Beep, Beep.
The alarm on her laptop brought her back to reality.
A first look at her program at this new dataset did not result in much useful information. She did not expect any results either. Undaunted, she sat down and examined the data set again and developed a new version of her program. Though not as easy as she thought, but totally driven to get some results, she pressed on. After all, part of the consulting money was already in her possession and her reputation was on the line as well.
Since little was known about the dataset and the associated numbers, programming a blind search was an insurmountable task. But she was determined to get through. She sat up and programmed the laptop to do a more general search, thus taking more time than before. Time was not a concern; results were what she wanted.
Undaunted, she put the laptop to work and went to bed. It was way past midnight, very late, even by her standard.
After another week of tweaking the program, a pattern began to emerge. Quite encouraged by the results, she spent all her time tweaking her program other than attending to her classes.
Another week flew by and she was confident about the predictive power of her program. Without waiting further, she called Dr. Schmidtiz. Of course, he was delighted to hear from her and immediately set up another afternoon time to meet on the next day.