STUDENT RESEARCH
At our marine campus in Palma de Majorca, the student body spends a lot of time underwater. “Professor Bodary was a bit intimidating at first,” says AIT-Palma undergrad Consuela Iribarren. “I was taught from his textbooks in my freshman seminars.” Here she flashes a mischievous Iberian smile and glances around quickly to make sure she isn’t being overheard. “Then when I met him, he was just so cute. This little French man in canvas shoes. And so brilliant, but never condescending.”
Even majoring as a marine ecologist, Consuela never really imagined herself as a working scientist until Professor Bodary asked her to join AIT’s Gamete Barrier Project. “I was flattered of course, and a bit shocked,” she says. “To have this man I only knew through books actually want me to work with him on something so important … it was why I came to AIT, even though I didn’t know that when I made the choice.”
The Gamete Barrier Project is an ongoing effort to prevent the interbreeding of wild fauna with their gengineered farm-raised relatives. The crash of the salmon fishery in the Gulf of Maine, USA, in 2007 was the first hard evidence that such interbreeding could produce catastrophic failures in wild populations, and studies throughout the twenty-first century concluded that interbreeding of wild and gengineered species would have unpredictable and possibly apocalyptic consequences for ecosystems throughout the world. At its founding, AIT took up the problem, and by the turn of the twenty-second century, under the guidance of Professor Michel Bodary, the Gamete Barrier Project was the most promising line of defense against propagation of unwanted genes in the Earth’s wildlife. The method is simple: insert a trigger into the gametes of, for example, gengineered farm shrimp. This trigger looks for a particular gene in the gametes of that shrimp’s breeding partners; if it is not present, the two gametes cannot form a zygote.
“It’s a simple idea,” Consuela says, “but it has taken more than a century of research to actually catalog the sites on the genome of an individual species where such a trigger might act. Only now is Professor Bodary,” and, we must add, Consuela herself, “beginning to test and implement actual triggers in important species such as salmon and tuna. We are going to work on shrimp next.”
“When I came to AIT,” says Ivars Olte, “I thought I knew my way around recombinant computing. Now I go to lab every day and pass Nobel laureates in the halls.” This is a common experience at AIT-Sapporo, home to the world’s densest concentration of bioscience brilliance. Not just among the current faculty, either, although any faculty that boasts such luminaries as Dr. Kimihiro Watanabe is an intellectual force to be reckoned with; AIT-Sapporo’s student body includes the best and brightest bioscience minds from one hundred and sixteen nations on all seven continents.
Ivars, a native of the Baltic Federation, is involved in Dr. Na Katmanivong’s Recombinant Processor Project, which employs synthetic DNA as the switching mechanism of a computer that is not only fast but -- according to Dr. Katmanivong -- a little bit different. “There are AI processors out there that are faster than our current prototypes,” Dr. Katmanivong cheerfully acknowledges. Then he grows earnest. “What’s different about our project is that given the same operation a dozen times, the biological computer will complete it a dozen different ways, and each of them will arrive at the correct destination.”
“It’s thinking,” Ivars says, as his mentor nods vigorously. “The Recombinant Processor is the first real artificial thinking machine.”
“Not yet at the stage where we can ask it the meaning of life,” laughs Dr. Katmanivong. “But there does seem to be an intuitive process at work. Different paths to the same destination; this is something that mechanical computers are able to do, but to take those different paths means a great cost to speed of execution. The Recombinant Processor finishes each operation in approximately the same time no matter what steps it takes along the way.”
After the meeting with his mentor, Ivars is still effusive. “When I came here, I thought I’d end up working in a lab somewhere doing grunt work. Re-engineering amino acids or something. But this has been so different. Dr. Katmanivong recognized something in me, and now I think we’re really on the verge of a breakthrough. We’re designing something that’s actually intuitive. That’s never been done before.”
Keep at it, Ivars. That’s the AIT way.
Martina came from Ukraine to study envirotecture at AIT-Ulan Bator. “I want to design residential AIs,” she says, and she has a lap-pad full of sketches to prove it. Some of her designs recall the gleaming retro-Bau creations of Beate Bosch. Others have a very Kate Nei-like zen quality. Still others, Martina’s favorites, evoke the integrated living spaces for which Martin Swinton is renowned.
“I saw a Swinton house once,” she gushes, sketching it on her lap-pad. What emerges is curvaceous, welcoming, perfectly at home in the Asian mountains of Ulan Bator. Martina adds a few lines to it, then wipes the pad clean. There’s another house of Swinton’s featured in Metropolitan Living Homes; with quick, economical strokes she sketches it. For these few moments, AIT-UB feels a bit like an art school. Then Martina starts talking about the technical specifications of the morphing interiors so common to Swinton spaces. Words like biolattice and chromanites enter the conversation. “That’s how I want to design, that’s the future of the field. Soon we won’t just live in a house; we’ll live in a space that from day to day can be anything we want it to be. AI technology has progressed to the point where we can make that a reality.”
And for her, there was no other choice but AIT-UB. “Everyone here is at the forefront of envirotecture. I have seminars on the mathematics of feng shui, the synergy between the psychology of a given AI and the layout of the space it’s given to inhabit. We call that topological synergistics. I’ve pursued that a little bit, investigating datasphere topology, just to see how it might influence the way residential AIs interact with physical space given the fact that they actually inhabit nonspatial dimensions.”
Martina is in an accelerated program, synthesizing architecture, AI biometrics, and philosophies of space. She’ll have her MAS by the end of next year, and then have to make a decision. “I’ll continue at AIT-UB for my PhD,” she says, and a wistful look comes into her pale blue eyes. “But if I could intern at Martin Swinton Designs for a year before coming back, now that would be the way to go.”
“My grandparents came from the New World to the Old,” says Henry Owen as he relaxes on the balcony of his AIT-Brooks dormitory. In the distance, the spectacular Cascades dominate the horizon. “Then I came from the Old back to the New again.” Owen’s grandparents immigrated to England from St. Lucia, bringing with them business savvy learned in the family import-export trade. When Henry was named a Garcia Exceptional EuroScholar, it was because of his preparatory work in the Social Dynamics of Information Technology, a field pioneered at the University of Michigan in the early twenty-first century and turned into a discipline of its own by Osvaldo Gutierrez at AIT-Brooks.
So it was to Brooks that Henry came. “I’d read about Dr. Gutierrez’s work in school, and my honors project relied heavily on his work. So when the Garcia scholarship came through, it made sense to come to Brooks.”
Gutierrez’s work demonstrated that information flows much like money, collecting in certain areas and avoiding others. His equations describing the process extended the work of late-twentieth-century complexity theorists, bringing a firm mathematical basis to the slippery and politically fraught territory of economics. “There’s no way to absolutely predict how information will act,” says Henry Owen. “What you can do, though, is draw broad conclusions, the way you can about ocean currents or weather patterns. Knowing how information wants to act, you can begin to manipulate it by altering its circumstances.”
And in an information economy, being able to manipulate the flow of information is a lucrative and necessary business. “I’m not a social reformer,” Henry says. “But I can see myself going back to St. Lucia, bringing the expertise on informational flow I’ve picked up here at AIT-Brooks. Everybody wants to go home sometime.”
Sounds like his grandparents’ import-export business all over again, the interviewer says. “That’s right,” Henry says with a smile. “The family business. They moved hot sauce and sugar, other agricultural things. I’ll grow information, move it in and out.”
“I came to Zaragosa to study AI Law,” says Robert Seidner. Growing up in Budapest the son of lawyers, he was encouraged by his father to pursue the law, and when the Garcia EuroScholar program tabbed him, Robert decided that AIT was the place for him. “My father was a little surprised,” he says. “He was expecting me to study law somewhere else, one of the traditional schools. Oxford, Heidelberg, Sorbonne. You know. But I said to him, ‘Nowhere but AIT does AI law the way I want to learn it.’
‘Okay!’ my father said. ‘You learn your robot law, I’ll stick with real estate.’” Robert laughs at the recollection.
Some of the most provocative unresolved questions in AI law are argued out in AIT-Z seminars every day. Who owns the datasphere? Do AIs have rights over it, as some advocates for Abolition have argued, or is it a human creation and therefore subject to human adjudication? In the coming years, especially with the shadow of the rumored Mann Act II falling over human-AI interactions, case law in these and other issues will be written, and AIT-educated lawyers will argue it.
Robert’s current interest is in datasphere property issues, perhaps a fitting specialty for the son of real-estate attorneys. Can the datasphere be said to exist in such a way that anyone, human or AI, can own parts of it? If not, can information conduits be owned? Are the portals between the datasphere and the physical world subject to physical property law or the evolving law of the datasphere? Asked these questions, Robert plays it safe. “I’m still learning,” he says. “I have some opinions, but I’ve already changed my mind about a lot of things in my three years at AIT-Z. When I graduate, I guess, that’s when I’ll feel like I can argue property law with my parents.”
Hanan’s parents immigrated to Germany from Egypt when she was a small child. What’s her primary memory of the land of her birth? Not the Pyramids. Not the Sphinx. Not the Valley of the Kings.
“Aswan Dam,” she says, eyes bright. “So big, so white, so powerful to hold back the Nile.”
From the moment she saw the Aswan Dam, Hanan says, she knew she wanted to be an engineer. And with a solid Gymnasium education behind her, the Garcia Exceptional EuroScholar program offered her a chance to study engineering at AIT-Barcelona. “I could have gone other places,” she says, “but when the Garcia program offered AIT, I knew the decision was made for me.”
At AIT-B, Hanan studies materials science and fluid dynamics. She’s already worked on a prototype personal near-orbit spacecraft with Professor Brian McSweeney, who before coming to AIT-B sold McSweeney Orbitals to Parabola Aerospace Group. “Professor McSweeney has helped me more than I can say,” marvels Hanan. “Every course with him is like an engineering education unto itself.”
As seductive as spacecraft engineering is, Hanan’s ultimate dream lies closer to home. “I want to rebuild the Aswan Dam,” she says. Rebuild the Aswan Dam, one of the great marvels of twentieth-century engineering? Why?
“As an engineer, I appreciate the majesty of it,” she says. “But as an Egyptian, I want to see the Nile flow free again.” The Nile’s floods once irrigated crops and left behind rich soil for Egypt’s farmers. Construction of the dam electrified Egypt and created a stable water supply for the country’s growing cities, but the great river’s yearly ebb and flow is gone. And, perhaps more importantly, the fish stocks in the Eastern Mediterranean collapsed decades ago, largely because the Aswan Dam prevented nutrient-rich silts from flowing downriver to the sea. Mitigation efforts undertaken in the 2080s, including the dredging of millions of tons of silt from Lake Nasser, have failed to restore the criticial fishery.
Hanan Assad dreams of a day when she can create a new Aswan Dam that will power Egypt but free the Nile to perform its ancient duties of replenishment and renewal. Together with her natural drive and discipline, her AIT education can make that dream come true.