Sci-Fi Part 5

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With the new job, I no longer needed to work at Java Boat and Lucky Goose, but I ended up keeping the Java Boat job anyway. I got free coffee, plus it was a friendly atmosphere, and I got to meet a lot of people. Working on research makes you feel kind of isolated sometimes, between being in a windowless lab all day and having only a handful of people who understand what you're working on.  Well, in honesty, I didn't work in the lab much anymore, since all of my data was on my laptop, and I wasn't allowed to download it on the lab computers anyway. 

I was at the Java Boat now, on a half hour break, enjoying a free latte and trying to make progress on the IRIS project. I had a few hours left in my shift at the Cow, and then I was going to meet with Soyo.  I really wanted to make some more progress before we met. 

"Ah-hah," I muttered to myself. "I know what I'll try...".  Just then, my cell phone rang. It was Monique.

"Hey big sis! What's up?"

"Not much, work," I said, "Why are you calling?" 

"Well, I've been thinking a lot, that maybe photography isn't quite the thing for me..."

Oh dear, we've had similar conversations to this many times before. "What are you changing your major to now?"

"I'm thinking about switching to investigative journalism and forensics. I love solving puzzles and mysteries.  It will be just the right thing for me. I know I change my mind a lot, but this time I'm really sure."

"Right," I said, not believing her last bit about being sure.

"Anyway, what are you up to?"

"I'm working on a project - I'm actually a little busy right now."

"Oh, cool. What's your project on?"

"I'm not really supposed to say... it's proprietary or confidential or something.  Anyway, I can't tell you. Stop bugging me about it."

"Ok, ok, man, just trying to take interest in my big sister's life, or lack thereof. Alright, I'll talk to you later..."

"Wait - what do you mean lack there-of?" I asked irritatedly, but she had already hung up.  Ugh, little sisters.

I glanced at my watch - my break was almost over, and I had lost my train of thought. Not much working on it now.  I shut my laptop down, and went back to my post behind the counter.

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"Very good, I am pleased with your progress," Soyo said, smiling, after I had demoed my progress. Phew, that was a relief. This was our third meeting. The first had been three weeks ago, when he told me about the project, and the second was two weeks ago, when he had given me the scanner and box full of data.

"Here is a list of goals I hope to accomplish by next week," I said, handing him a piece of paper that I had just printed out five minutes before in the student computer lounge.

"Very good, very good," he said, glancing at it. "We are going to begin a new project soon, and are looking for another student with signal processing expertise to join our team.  Would you recommend someone from your classes?"

"Carl Eigenvetzki," I blurted out without thinking. "Er, well, he's not an image processor, per se - he does more sound."

"We are interested in image, mainly," Soyo said, "But we will consider him.  Please tell him to contact us."

"Ok, will do."

"Well, thank you for your time - see you again in two weeks," he stood up to escort me out the door.

"Ok," I said jumping up. "Just a quick question on the data set. Are these brain scans?"

He frowned for a split second, but immediately arranged his face into a smile again.  "I am not sure what you mean - this data was given me by an internal team. I don't know what the data contains. I don't think it has anything to do with brain scans."  He looked somewhat confused, but remained smiling.  It kind of unnerved me.

"Thanks - I was just wondering. Thanks for your time." I left, feeling like I had overstepped some boundary.  Maybe I shouldn't have asked that last question.  Well, no matter. Now, I had to find Carl, and convince him to take the offer.

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"Image? But my expertise is in sound!" Carl said, when I told him. 

"I know, I know, but it's the same thing really." He raised his eyebrow at me. "Ok, ok, it's not. But, I think you'll do fine. And it pays really well. And it's way more stable than the NIS grant that you're on - that could get canceled any semester."

"Actually," he said embarrassedly. "It did get canceled already. Professor Black told me I only had one semester of funding left."

"No way, then you have to join." I told him my story - that Professor Black had told me the same thing.

"Alright - I'll try them out. What's the number," he asked, smiling. I told him. "If this works out, Charlie, I owe you one," he said.

As it turned out, it did work out.  Carl was offered a position immediately.  He would begin working with me on the current project, and then when the other project began, he'd transfer to that one. 

We were in my apartment, pouring over the code I had already written.  He was a little panicked about beginning so soon, and was bombarding me with questions and jotting down notes in his writing pad.

Val was getting ready to leave for work. "I'm sure that those images are brain scans," she insisted, just before she left. Carl looked at me quizzically. "She thought these images are brain scans. Soyo wasn't sure what they were."  Val could be quite stubborn.

Sci-Fi Part 4

"What's up?" I asked Professor Black. I was back in his office, but this time he had told me that he had some good news for me.

"The IRIS foundation contacted me, and they're looking for an expert in image processing. I can recommend you for it, if you're interested?  It's a paid position."

"Sounds great!" I said.

The next day I met with Soyo Kim, a representative of the IRIS foundation representative, which apparently stood for "Innovative Research in Science".

"The task that you will work on is straightforward," he said.  "We would like you to analyze several groups of training images to find patterns in each group. Then, with some new images, we would like a program that detects which group each new image fits into, based on those patterns."

"A simple supervised learning and clustering problem," I told him. "Piece of cake."

"Excellent," he said. "I'm sure you will be a great asset to our research project. We are ready to sign you up for it. Before we do, though, you must sign a non-disclosure agreement." He handed me a few stacks of paper. "They all say the same thing, but you need to sign each copy. You know, beurocracy," he said, with a rather plastic-looking smile. I skimmed through the first one - nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I signed all of papers and handed them back to him. 

"Congratulations on your new position, Ms. Nguyen," he said.

The project was indeed as straightforward as I had hoped it would be. The only tricky part was that the training images were not digital. Soyo had given me a cardboard box filled with a few thousand transparencies - the kind they used with overhead projectors back in the day.  That was the training set.  Soyo had prohibited me from using the school scanner on the classified training set, so he had instead bought me a personal scanner, and I used it to upload pictures one by one to my laptop.  So, it took quite a bit longer than I had thought to scan all of the images in.

One day, when I was working on the program on my laptop, Val came in. "What's with all the brain scans?" she asked me.

"Brain scans?" I asked dumbly.

"Yeah.  See, there's the occipital lobe," she pointed it out to me, "And there's temporal."

"Weird," I said. They did look like brains, now that she mentioned it. "Are these pictures of tumors?" I wondered if the goal of the project was to detect and prevent brain tumors or some other disease.

"No, those green bits wouldn't be so scattered," she said, indicating the green pixels that were scattered all over the brains in each image. "Looks more like a map of neural activity to me."

"Cool," I said, curious about what kind of neural activity patterns these images represented.  Maybe I'd ask Soyo in the next meeting. I signed a non-disclosure agreement, so I'm sure he'd tell me.

Sci-Fi Part 3

"I'm just going to come out and say this, Charlotte," Professor Black said.  We were in his office, and he was peering at me over the top of his glasses, frowning.  "Your major source of funding, the NIS grant, fell through. As of now, we have no funding next semester for you."

Oh man - this was bad news indeed.

"I checked with the department for any R.A. and T.A. positions that you could take next semester, and I'm afraid there are none. Apparently, NIS has refused renewal on a lot of grants for the next year, and those positions are already filled up.  That means, you're on your own for funding for the next two semesters."

"O.K.," I said. I wasn't quite sure what to say.

I left his office very dejected. I had planned to go to the lab after meeting with him, but didn't feel up to it. I felt very fatigued, suddenly. I went home and flopped face first on to the sofa. I must have fallen asleep then, because the next thing I knew, it was mid-afternoon, and Val was shaking my leg, trying to wake me up. "Hey, you, what happened? You alright?" she asked.

I told her about the NIS grant. "Oh man," she said. "What are you going to do?"

The nap had blown some new energy and calmness into me. "I'm going to look for scholarships and fellowships," I told her. I had never bothered with them before, because the grant had covered my full tuition plus a stipend.

I spent the remainder of that day and the next searching online for scholarship and fellowship opportunities. There were quite a few for first-year PhD students and for students of several highly-specialized fields, but none for my field, and no general ones for students at my stage of the PhD. So, I started hunting for part-time work. I found a job at the local coffee-shop. I had dreamed of being a world-class researcher, and here I was, a barista with a green apron and hat that said, "Welcome to Java Boat."

When next semester rolled around, and tuition was due, my bank balance took a major hit. I took out a student loan - the first I ever had - to meet it. Even with the loan, I found myself strapped for cash.  The contents of our fridge were reduced from tomatos and Jack Daniels to just tomatos. I took a second job at another coffee shop, and now I was a barista with two sets of aprons and hats - one for Java Boat, and one for the Lucky Goose. I felt grateful that college students drink so much caffeine.

With the two jobs, I had less time to go to the lab, though.  It no longer looked like I'd be done with my thesis soon, which meant that I'd have more semesters of college to pay for. I was not quite sure what to do.

Sci-Fi Part 2

"Take something, honey. I've been slaving away at this all day, and you haven't touched a bite," Mom said.

Actually, I had just stuffed myself so full, I was ready to pass out. "I'm done," I choked out. "No more."

"You make too much on this day," Dad laughed, poking his fork at Mom. 

She frowned at him. "This is a family tradition, we gotta have all this," she insisted.

"So... I decided to change my major," Monique said, as she twirled one of her braids around her finger.

"Again?" Dad said, startled. "What happen to writing? Why didn't you stick with first thing you chose?"

"Writing just isn't my thing," Monique said, dramatically.  I stifled a laugh. Honestly - I didn't want to make fun of her, but my little sister could never make up her mind.  Even when we were little, she was like that.  Dad had once taken us to the toy store and asked us to pick one toy each.  I had known what I wanted in five minutes - a shiny new jump rope. My sister had taken forty minutes to decide - picking up one toy and declaring it was the best in the store, then finding another one she liked better two mintues later.

"You do what your heart tells you," Mom said.

"Your heart is too indecisive! Should listen to your Dad, instead. He'll give you good advice." Dad said.

"Well, I didn't stray too far. I'm going to major in photography. It's related to writing," she said, trying to placate Dad, "Except it is so much better." She launched into a list of reasons why photography was the best possible major.

I sat back, enjoying the fact that I was with my family, and that this conversation was highly amusing.

My mom and dad could not be more different people. I wonder how they ever got married.  Mom was a down-to-earth, working-class, tell-it-like-it-us woman. She grew up in Louisiana.  Dad was a first-generation immigrant from Vietnam and worked as an electrical engineer.

"What about you, Charlotte?" Mom asked. "How are things going for you?"

"Pretty good," I said. "I'm making pretty good progress on my thesis. I should be done soon at this rate."

We cleared the table, then did the dishes. After we put them away, I stole into the living room to check my email on the family computer. There was an email from Professor Black, telling me to meet him immediately as soon as I got back from break.  He had some news to tell me, and it did not look like it would be good.

Sci-Fi Part 1

Here is an attempt at a "fan fiction" - though it is not part of the fandom of any work.  Let me know your feedback.  Hope you enjoy.  (Note - I am bored and love to procrastinate on homework :-P)

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"...and then you use the Lagrangian of the Gaussian...", Carl said animatedly, as we were walking down the street.

"Laplacian of the Gaussian," I corrected him, laughing.  "Honestly, your math is horrible.  How'd you get in this program?" I teased him.

His face turned a little red, but he joked good-naturedly, "A little bit of honest bribery!"

I laughed.  I didn't really think he was bad at math. Actually, he was one of the most brilliant people I had ever met.  Not to mention the kindest.  And funniest.  But, I didn't tell him that.  It might go to his head.  Plus, he might find it awkward.

"Charlie," he elbowed me, and pointed to a Vietnamese restaurant we were walking by. "Have you been to this one? I heard it's very good."

"I haven't," I replied.

"Must be nothing compared to what you get at home, though," he smiled.

I laughed. "Actually, I've got nothing to compare it to.  My mom was African American.  And my dad can't cook to save his life. So, I didn't get any authentic Vietnamese cuisine growing up."

"Ah," he said.  I felt a little bad for blurting that out. Maybe he was growing wary of my contradictions. 

We reached my apartment.  We both stood nervously outside for a second.  "Would you like to come in for a few minutes?  Warm up from the cold?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, and we stepped inside.  Oh man, my place was a total mess. I should have tidied up a little before I left. I considered telling him that it was the fault of my roomate, Val, but decided against it. That'd be a lie - I was the messier one.

He didn't seem to mind the mess though. He stepped over a pile of medical journals and sat on the couch. "Got any vodka?" he laughed.

"How about Jack Daniels, instead," I asked, taking two from our refrigerator and handing him one. 

I picked up my laptop from my desk and went to sit next to him on the couch.  "Here, you'll like this," I said, "Here are the results I got from the latest run of my program."  We talked excitedly about our research for the next few minutes.  Carl and I were working in the same lab at the University of Califoria Los Angeles, under the same advisor, Jack Black. His specialty was speech signal processing. Mine was image signal processing. We ended up using many of the same techniques.

While we were deep in conversation, the door opened, and Val, my roomate came in. "Phew, busy night," she said, putting down her medical bag. "Oh, hi," she said, seeing Carl. She held out her hand, "Nice to meet you, I'm Val."

"Carl," he said, shaking her hand. "Pleasure to meet you. Please sit down," he said, scooting over to make room for her.

"Thank you," she said, taking a seat.

"So what do you do?" Carl asked politely.

"I'm completing my residency," Val explained. "I'll be done this year."

"Let me grab dinner," I offered, as Val and Carl made small talk.

I opened the refrigerator.  Oh dear - looks like we were out of everything except tomatos and Jack Daniels. Not much of a dinner.  I opened the cupboard - it had some moldy bread and Saltines.  I tossed the bread, laid the Saltines on a plate, cut up the tomatos, and laid them on top of the Saltines.  This was mortifying.

"Bon appetit!" I said, laying the plate on the coffee table. 

Carl politely picked up a soggy Saltine and bit into it.

"This is dinner?" Val asked incredulously. She was always a blunt one. 

"We didn't have anything else," I whispered irritatedly to her.  Honestly - she was just as much responsible for shopping as I was.  

"What are plans for Thanksgiving break," Carl said hurriedly, trying to change the subject.

"Going to home to Quebec to visit my sister," said Val. "How about you?"

"No plans, just hanging out here," he said. "How about you, Charlie?"

"Home to Phoenix," I said, happily. I hadn't seen my family in a while and was looking forward to spending some time with them.