What was surprising, was that they managed to make it on television and quickly. NBC called and wanted Dubois to be part of their Monday show, just three days after their press release went out. Previous announcements, albeit less exciting, had only been picked up by local papers. Something about their latest news sure got somebody excited. It made Alison wonder who got bumped. Hopefully some corporate executive lined up to hype a new product line or brag about how much richer they were.
Chris Ramirez approached with his own mug and looked at his watch. “Didn’t start yet, did it?”
She shook her head and bobbed her tea bag a couple times.
“You know you should have gone with him,” he said, taking a tentative sip.
Alison shook her head. “Nah. He’s better at this kind of stuff.”
“True,” Chris said, with a shrug. “Definitely doesn’t have anything to do with him loving the spotlight.”
She raised her cup to hide the grin.
Suddenly Matt Lewis’s face filled the screen, his words barely audible until Lee turned up the volume. “Here we go!”
“…at the Miami City Aquarium where a team of marine biologists have been trying to do the unthinkable. Talk to another species. With me today is Frank Dubois, the director of the center and the research being done there. Welcome Dr. Dubois.”
“Thank you, Matt.” Frank’s face filled the screen and both Chris and Lee let out a whoop. He looked good, comfortable on camera, much better than she would have.
“Doctor, I have to say, this is really exciting. I never knew there was such research being done at the aquarium. How did this all get started?”
Frank flashed his perfect smile and shrugged graciously. He was a natural. “Well the idea is not all that new, but the technology required for this approach was not available until very recently. We started with a small grant and eventually garnered enough interest to pay some salaries. In fact, much of the first two years of research was done on a volunteer basis by our senior researcher Alison Shaw-”
Lee Kenwood leaned over and gave her a friendly bump. “Alright Ali.”
“It’s a miracle,” Chris mumbled under his breath.
“Stop it!” She blushed and stared back at the screen. Accepting compliments was not her strong point.
Lewis continued on screen. “So tell me about this IMIS system.”
“Well it’s a distributed computing system which means we divvy up the load to a lot of smaller individual computers, over a hundred in this case. This gives us processing power much greater than what we could achieve even with a super computer, and at a fraction of the cost.”
“And what does IMIS mean?
“IMIS is short for InterMammal Interpretive System.”
“And this IMIS translates the language?” asked Lewis.
Frank smiled. “Well not yet. But basically, yes IMIS works by recording all of the recognizable sounds from our dolphins; all of their clicks, whistles, even postures. Once all of those have been captured in multiple scenarios we then start the translation process using an advanced artificial intelligence program.” He smiled again. “Or at least we attempt a translation.”
Lewis frowned. “So is this going to work, I mean how long will it take to make this kind of breakthrough?”
“Well the recording phase, or what we call phase one, has been completed. Now we’ve begun phase two which is Translation, and that’s all computer. Unfortunately since this has never been done before we really don’t have an estimate on how long it will take. But the intelligence program is designed to learn as it goes, so every day it should get a little bit smarter.”
Lewis shook his head incredulously. “How on earth do you write a program that talks to dolphins?”
“You get IBM’s help.” They both laughed. “IBM is actually one of our sponsors. They have donated most of the hardware and a lot of programming brainpower. The software is really quite impressive.”
“I bet it is,” Lewis continued, looking down at his notes. “It says here that NASA is also one of your sponsors.”
“That’s right.”
Lewis shook his head. “Okay IBM I understand, but why NASA? What interest would they have in something like this?”
“That’s a common question. NASA is more interested in the technology that we’re using than us actually making contact. They are hoping to build on the technology and one day use it to communicate with an alien intelligence. If they find one that is.”
“Really?” Lewis was genuinely surprised.
Frank took a sip of water and nodded. “Yes. Their thinking is that our hopes of communicating with aliens are pretty remote if we haven’t even learned to communicate with another species on the same planet.” He shrugged. “The fundamental approaches should be very similar.”