The Daughter They Abandoned Is The Doctor They Can’t Reach Chapter 05
The first seminar of the program started the next morning.
The speaker was Professor Warren from the engineering school, whose research had been cited in my high school textbook.
The title of the session was only three words: Interdisciplinary Modeling.
He barely touched on the basics. Equations, case studies, and datasets flashed by one after another. I couldn’t copy down full sentences fast enough, so I focused on the key parameters and scribbled algorithm ideas in the margins of my notebook.
Before the session ended, Professor Warren projected an open-ended problem onto the screen.
“How do you predict a set of complex behaviors from incomplete neural signals?”
He added, “You can choose this for next week’s group project.”
Afterward, I was still bent over my notes, organizing them, when someone caught up with me on the way to the dining hall.
“Nora?”
I stopped.
The boy held out his hand. “Eli Grant. I was sitting behind you.”
I shook it.
“That fitting method you were writing down—can you explain it? I only caught half of it.”
I blinked, surprised.
“You mean the neural network idea?”
“Yeah. The professor had barely finished giving the prompt and you were already sketching the structure.”
I opened my notebook and pointed.
“You don’t have to fill in the missing signals first. You can use the pattern of what’s missing as an input, too. That way, the network learns from both the data and the source of the bias, and you can constrain it using the known behavioral samples.”
Eli stared at the few lines of formulas, his eyes lighting up.
“That’s a really cool angle.”
He immediately brought up a paper used in brain-computer interfaces, pointing out that my model could incorporate a time-series layer.
I added some thoughts on parameter settings, and he took out his phone to write down the paper’s title.
No one was trying to prove who was smarter.
No one was taking my idea and acting like it had always been theirs.
When we reached the dining hall entrance, Eli suddenly asked, “Hey, do you want to work on the group project together next week?”
Back in that house in Pittsburgh, no one had ever asked if I wanted to do anything with them.
I closed my notebook.
“Sure.”