Fellowship of the Aggie Ring

An unbelizable recovery of my ring from Hol Chan

(This article appeared in Amandala, Belize in July 2020)

Being a native of Mauritius, an island famous for its dodo bird and turquoise lagoons, I felt embarrassed about putting on a floating vest to explore the dancing colors engulfing the exquisite marine life at Hol Chan in Belize. Halfway through the seamlessly planned tour by Ambergris Divers, my amateurism in snorkeling was reaffirmed, for I could feel my huge ring sliding far too freely down my finger. I should have left it behind at Diamond Lodge, my cozy boutique hotel on Seagrape Drive. After all, I earned this precious (and expensive) ring after many years in computer science classes at Texas A&M University in Aggieland. But then, the beauty and bliss of the marine reserve soon lulled me out of earthly quandaries.

I gained confidence and took off the vest, and that must have been it—those maneuvers pushed the ring off into the deep sea. This reality hit me like a gut punch when I climbed back on board and felt my right hand unusually bare. I felt stupid and sad, especially since everything had worked out perfectly so far: hassle-free arrival at the airport in Belize City, pleasant cab ride to the water taxi terminal, ferry to the picturesque San Pedro town on Ambergris Caye — a stunning island with gorgeous beaches, gracious people, and great food.

My sullen demeanor was probably perceptible, for the crew enquired about my state of mind. I told them, not without a lame attempt at a not-a-big-deal lie. But two of the three divers were more than willing to help, and plunged into a mortifying half-hour desperate search. The other tourists graciously dismissed my apologies, probably caught up in the wavering flow of time that pervades over this idyllic isla bonita and San Pedro that Madonna dreamt of.

The divers did come back with a ring, but one of scrap wire twisted into shape. Once again, I grinned at the delightful sense of humor that defines the smooth, smiling, and cool islanders. This note of levity helped me move on with my adventure — long walks down the “secret” beach, lobster at Palapas, street food at Central Park, and Belikin (local beer) at Caye Caulker, a nearby island. And probably the most fun, for the solo-traveler I like to be, was meeting great people, locals and tourists alike: Diego and Shizam going out of the way to help me find my bearing to end up at a Karaoke bar, hanging out with the ebullient and hilarious traveling sisterhood from all over the Caribbean and southern USA, shots with Vermonters in search of some tropical warmth, and spontaneous, warm banter with amiable tour guides, vendors, and locals.

I returned home in College Station, Texas, in good spirits, even if my lost ring almost doubled the cost of my getaway. As I unpacked and threw away useless bills and papers, I somehow held on to the Ambergris Divers card, and later emailed them about my ring, almost giggling at my naive belief in a miracle.

The reply was surprisingly prompt and impressive. Not only did I get a sympathetic note from Karen at Ambergris Divers, but she even shared my misfortune on a bulletin with other operators and guides. Lo and behold, just a few days later, Karen informed me that the ring was found! She referred me to Krista and Raquel at Amigos del Mar. My ring was recovered by Santiago, one of their divers. It sounded too good to be true, and I was skeptical. But Whatsapp messages from Santiago and a picture of my ring (with my name clearly inscribed) from Raquel turned my cynicism into shame.

Unbelizable! What are the odds of the ring being found and me knowing about it? As spring break was around the corner, I decided to wait a few weeks and head back with my two children, who were earning their vacation from university classes. I convinced them to join me on this quest for a ring, a little like the adventure of Frodo’s clique to middle earth. I flaunted my confidence on this second trip, not missing an opportunity to exhibit my knowledge of this relatively unknown South American (and Caribbean) country. I was happy that my kids shared my fondness for Belize. As we settled in at Tropical Dreams Villa, I shared my story with the owner Lisa, a sweet, meticulously organized, and very helpful host. She liked the story and helped in its conclusion: meetings with Karen at Ambergris Divers, as well as Santiago, Krista, and Raquel at Amigos del Mar. I was reunited with my ring, over some friendly banter and pictures. To my amazement, Santiago never found the golden gem glistening in the clear waters of Hol Chan, but felt the hard, perfectly shaped artifact while reaching out for an elusive octopus at night!

We left Belize just before COVID-19 stalled the world. With the daily help from Worldometers, I was happy and impressed to know how Belize contained the pandemic, far more effectively than more affluent countries. However, I can only imagine the devastating cost of keeping Belizeans healthy, given their reliance on tourists. I should not be too surprised by their effectiveness in dealing with the pandemic, given their network to quickly and effectively communicate to address my mishap. Sure, it was no Coronavirus catastrophe, but often, small details foretell the big picture.

I look forward to returning to Belize, a place where I felt comfortable, safe, and completely at peace with myself. I look forward to the splendor along its coasts and the rich Mayan history inland. I look forward to the genuine smile and charm of Belizeans — and I will definitely drop by to greet the fellowship of friends I made around the loss and recovery of my Aggie ring.

My columns that appeared on L'Express, Mauritius

Emulating nature’s genius (October 2011)

Learning from the birds and the bees (September 2011)

At the crossroads of biology and computer science (June 2011)

Artificial intelligence & virtual regret (May 2011)

Artificial Intelligence: from science fiction to reality (May 2011)

La Faya in New Orleans (May 2011)

Queing theory (April 2011)

Comparing apples to oranges? (February 2011)

Mo gagn twa fraise (November 2010)

Of choices, decisions and ambivalence (November 2010)

God and Gravity (September 2010)

Of chickens, eggs and dodos (August 2010)

Traffic jam: How are we faring? (August 2010)

Thank you, Africa. Olá Brasil (July 2010)

2010 FIFA World Cup: The science behind the Jabulani (June 2010)

A day at the pyramids (June 2010)

Emulating nature’s genius (appeared on L'Express, Mauritius, October 2011)

If you are struggling with a design or engineering problem, and Google could not search deep enough, try nature. Our biological world is an amazing R&D lab created 3.8 billion years ago, when the first bacteria showed up. So many solutions have been tried by life forms in their quest to constantly adapt, innovate, and survive. The fittest solutions have prevailed, and they are generally energy-efficient, pollution-free, and available without patent or copyright issues.  

We have always looked at nature for inspiration and design. Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers turned to pigeons and other birds in their dreams to make us fly. More recently, the Kingfisher beak’s design led to energy-efficient and less noisy trains in Japan.  In Mauritian Kreol, an apt metaphor for being cool and unaffacted is dilo lor bred sonz. Well, water-repellent plants have inspired a new generation of impervious paint, glass, and fabric finishes that greatly reduce the need for chemical cleaning.

Some African termites can maintain a constant temperature and humidity in their nest, by closing and opening vents all over the nest, and thus meticulously regulating the flow of air. This principle has been used to design buildings that save massively on air conditioning. 

Your grand-mother’s plant concoctions for illnesses have been learned painstakingly. This wisdom has actually evolved over millions of years of trial and error, and now we are learning more on how other animals, like chimpanzees, developed their own pharmacy in the forest.

Dolphins can communicate 25 kilometers apart, even in turbulent water (by using multiple frequencies). This has helped creating underwater data transmission that is currently employed in the tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean. 

And the list goes on. www.asknature.org catalogs thousands of the most elegant ideas derived from nature. They represent a tiny fraction of all innovative solutions developed by 10 millions of our bio-mates we are sharing the planet with, and roughly 90% of these species are yet to be discovered! 

Biomimicry

We have always tried to emulate life’s genius. Computer scientists have developed software that are (loosely) based on several of nature’s ideas, like the brain’s architecture (neural networks), survival of the fittest solutions (genetic algorithms), or the collective behavior of ants or bees (swarm intelligence). But on the “hardware” side, it is only recently that the approach of replicating nature is formally studied. 

Biomimicry is a new discipline that was popularized by Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute. In her 1997 book, she defines biomimicry as a "new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems". Biomimicry has become particularly important in our quest for sustainable development, and it could be an economic game changer. A recent US report estimated that it will have a US$300 billion annual impact on the US economy, and $50 billion more on environmental remediation. 

Humans have, of course, crafted marvelous artifacts to improve their quality of life. Nonetheless our style of innovation is radically different from that of other species – the latter inherently sustains life rather than destroy it. Unlike shareholders, nature’s notion of profit is larger in scope and is not measured quarterly. To save the planet, there is a paradigm shift towards sustainable technology, and this can be achieved by paying more attention to the biological world around us. A lot can be learned on how certain algae clean water, how tissues self-assemble and self-repair, how the Namibian beetles pull water from the air, how leaves harness solar energy, how nature designs shapes that are energy-efficient, how microbes mine metals, how spiders synthesize strong fabric, how life forms conserve without a refrigerator, how nature clocks bio-degradation, how locusts sense and manage their traffic without collisions, or even how an oak-hickory forest runs its economy! 

Maybe the boardrooms of tomorrow should have more biologists. As Benyus puts it, we can look at nature as a model, measure (of the quality of our solutions), and mentor, especially in sustainability. We have certainly learned a lot about nature – we should now learn more from nature. 

Learning from the birds and the bees (appeared on L'Express, Mauritius, September 2011)

Austin, the capital city of Texas, is much touted as the “the live music capital of the world”. But what really amazed me on a summer trip there is harmony of a different kind.  Imagine 1.5 million bats emerging from under a bridge at dusk within a half an hour window, on their way for dinner with 30,000 pounds of insects on the menu - a spectacle that attracts 100,000 every year. When Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge was renovated in 1980, nobody suspected that the crevices in the structure would be ideal large-scale accommodation for a colony of pregnant Mexican Free-tailed Bats on a collective maternity stopover, giving birth before heading back together to colder Mexico.

 

Just like birds, bees, fishes and ants, bats have developed sophisticated social networks and communication systems that can put Facebook to shame, at least in terms of purposeful networking.  What enables such shared spirit, common purpose and distributed problem-solving capabilities? Birds and bees probably know little about combinatorial optimization, but the effectiveness of their self-organization intrigues many.  Such aggregate behavior of large populations, without any centralized control, is studied in a field known as “swarm intelligence”, where apparently very simple rules of action lead to emerging coherent functional patterns and global intelligence. For instance, ants, upon finding food leave a trail of a chemical (called pheromone) that others can follow. So a random food hunt is turned into a complex organization for targeted prospecting, where promising pathways are reinforced and lesser ones die out (when the pheromone gradually evaporates). The end result is amazingly effective and intelligent, and scientists are replicating such models to solve all kinds of problems – like reducing airline delays by improving taxiway traffic at busy airports, where a “colony” of pilots follow simple rules to efficiently produce globally effective queuing solutions. Bird flocking, foraging by honey bees, land animal herding, fish schooling, nest building by termites or wasps, and even bacterial growth are examples of swarm intelligence in nature.

Principles of swarm theory are being increasingly applied to various engineering, design and business problems. The team strategy of ants to detect food (and threats as well) is being used to protect computer networks from malicious programs that can delete data or steal passwords. Thousands of “digital ants” are made to wander through the cyber-world looking for threats, and leaving digital trails. This approach leads to an army of ants that converge to the spot you never suspected, just like in remote areas of your kitchen with food leftovers.

Swarm intelligence models learnt from our six-legged or flying bio-mates are also being used for routing information in telecommunication networks, ticketing and checking-in at airports, simulating crowd behavior, coordinating complex interactions among many robots in minesweeping or search and rescue missions. Computer graphic designers are crafting amazing displays based on the shapes generated by self-organized flocks of starlings or schools of fish. Scientists are also investigating swarm intelligence tactics to control a group of robots to explore remote Mars terrains. In medical nanotechnology, it now seems plausible that a collection of very small nano-robots can cooperate like animals do, to locate and destroy cancer tumors in the body.

Individual insects or animals react to their local environment, without any grasp of the global problem. Nonetheless they effectively influence each other to produce intelligent overall behavior. The sum is indeed greater than the parts. In human market economies, simple rules of self-centered actions of individuals help propel a complex, intelligent and collectively beneficial system, with the blessing of a wise invisible hand.  A key insight is that the absence of a centralized control means no centralized point of failure, and therefore a higher chance of success. Given the failures and dissatisfaction with so many of the centralized governance in human societies, maybe a swarm model is what we need – arguably the design that nature intended. Anyway, it is increasingly evident that the birds and the bees, long invoked to show children the ways of the world, have wisdom in store for adults too.

At the crossroads of biology and computer science (appeared on L'Express, Mauritius, June 2011)

Should Charles Babbage, the creator of the first computer, and Louis Pasteur, a biology pioneer (who luckily for men found how to prevent beer from souring!), have met as contemporaries 150 years ago, there is not much they could have talked about – except maybe women, or the weather (Babbage was British after all). Not much to share in academics anyway, because their disciplines had very little in common. Biology was largely a collection of facts, with few unifying theories, so much so that Earnest Rutherford relegated it as “stamp collection”. On the other hand, computer science is based on mathematical abstractions, and engineered with physics (the only science worthy of the name, according to Rutherford). But these disciplines have come together in surprising ways. Let’s look at a few of them.

Bioinformatics

First, consider bioinformatics, or the use of computers to solve difficult biological problems. Data on human and other forms of life (including plants) are very complex and voluminous.  Imagine a polite alien visiting earth wishing to bring back all biological information about a typical human, without abducting anyone of us. And he runs out of space on his pen drive! His best bet is to create a code that captures every detail in our body from fundamental building blocks. Well, there is a code like this, called the DNA, and it is three billion long. It takes sophisticated techniques to analyze the encoded 20,000 genes, or two million proteins with complicated structures that fold in specific ways to make our body work the way it does. Bioinformatics can help find the gene that may cause cancer or Alzheimer, or help create the right drug that can neutralize key proteins in AIDS or Chikungunya viruses. Bioinformatics is also about finding the “tree of life”, or how various species are related to each other based on evolution, by comparing their DNA sequences (this recently led to the discovery that Dodo and Solitaire are close cousins in the family of pigeons).

Biology-inspired computing

Another synergy between computers and biology stems from following Mother Nature’s lead to develop useful computer applications, without necessarily replicating the biology exactly. For instance, “neural networks” are computer programs that mimic how the brain activates interconnected neurons to solve complex problems with many parameters; “genetic algorithms” are programs that simulate the cross-breeding of species where the genetically fittest survive, and this is used to develop the fittest solutions; or how “swarm intelligence” draws ideas from ant colonies or bacterial growth for decision-making in complex environments.

Biological computing

An emerging area where biology and computers are converging is biological computing (or DNA computing). This field is about creating computers using biological molecules like DNA or proteins (especially enzymes). The idea of using DNA fragments as traditional computer “bits” was first proposed by  Leonard Adelman in 1994. Recently, this field boasted a major achievement: a bio-computer that can calculate square roots, based on work by Erik Winfree and Lulu Qian (California Institute of Technology). This type of computing is not designed to rival your laptop, but rather it allows computation in biological contexts, perhaps even in the body. "We'd like to make chemical systems that can probe their molecular environments, process chemical signals, make decisions, and take actions at the chemical level", says Winfree. Some predict a future where tiny DNA computers in our bodies will monitor, diagnose, medicate and repair!

Computational neuroscience

Finally, biology meets computer technology in computational neuroscience, where the information processing capabilities of the brain are studied. The recent Human Brain Project proposes to create computer models to simulate brain functionalities as closely as possible. This will potentially revolutionize medical neuroscience, and also help develop new computing techniques derived from the brain architecture.

Interdisciplinary endeavors that bring together biology, computer science and engineering are deemed critical for progress in key areas, including food, environment, energy and health. Computer scientists and biologists indeed have plenty to talk about and learn from each other today, and it would be much more than comparing stamps.

Artificial intelligence & virtual regret (appeared on L'Express, Mauritius, May 2011)

In this column last week, we looked at how artificial intelligence (AI) grew as a discipline, and how it is slowly filling the gap between technological realities and tall expectations from AI enthusiasts. In this article, we examine some of the more recent progresses in artificial intelligence, and dare to peek into the future.

Science fiction creators have, of course, let imaginations run wild. Science prehistoric times, human like artifacts have aroused interest and fantasy – overwhelmingly destructive in nature, as epitomized by Frankestein. And sometimes positive, like Isaac Asimov’s helpful robots. So, the typical scenario is machines turning into monsters with minds of their own. There is usually not much room for regret, sharing, altruism, and other such consciousness–based faculties of men. These belong more to the realm of emotional intelligence than machine intelligence.  But this may change.

For instance, few artificial intelligence systems so far dealt with “regret” explicitly. But recently Yishay Mansour, from Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Science, is introducing “hindsight” (and the regret it generates) into thinking machines to anticipate the future more accurately and realistically, especially in highly unpredictable environments. Well, the computer may not “feel” the regret of past decisions, but at least it can measure the difference between the actual outcome and the would-have-been outcome and use this wisdom to adapt future behavior. Virtual regret is not just science catching up with science fiction, but has practical applications as well. For instance, Google wants to know how programs that manage unpredictable internet traffic can regret, learn and improve – on their own. Or internet businesses (like online auctions) can use some hindsight to improve decision making and maybe avoid buyer’s remorse!  

With huge strides in unraveling the magic in our brains, we may be getting closer to first understand, and then replicate human traits. A very recent neuro-robotics study by Swiss Olaf Blanke elucidates one of the most fundamental subjective human feelings: self-consciousness. In particular, how our brain gets the feeling of being at a particular position in space and for perceiving the world from there. Or robotics researcher Dario Floreano,working with biologist Laurent Keller, to find where in our DNA is our altruism encoded – they used artificial entities with programmed altruistic potential to prove their point!

Strong and weak AI

Capabilities such as virtual regret may fail to impress many, because we are still far from the real and comprehensive intelligence as displayed by humans (referred to as “strong AI”). Optimism on attainment of human-level intelligence gradually gave way to an understanding of the immense complexity of intelligence.  There has been remarkable breakthroughs in understanding and thereby building very useful artifacts around human senses and faculties, such as memory, search, vision, planning, reasoning, decision-making, hearing, learning, language-understanding (referred to “weak AI”).  These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems – and also show signs of emoting, regretting  and feeling (even if the capabilities are not all packaged in one unit, and do not necessarily replicate the human faithfully).

The future of AI

For many, we are just at the beginning of a new and exciting era, and even close to a turning point for humanity. For example, in a famous essay in 1993, computer scientist Vernor Vinge envisions a “singularity point” in history where ultra-smart machines, that will be both self-aware and superhuman in intelligence, will be capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans. In his 2005 book “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”, Raymond Kurzweil uses Moore’s Law (that has correctly predicted the doubling of computing power every one and half years) to foresee the arrival of post-human evolution in 2045. Accordingly to Kurzweil, rapidly increasing computing power along with Cyborgs (beings with both biological and artificial parts), would lead to a point when machine intelligence would surpass human intelligence and take over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences.

Let's hope that one day we get to see ultra-smart AI capable of virtual regret, without real regret.