Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio.

And hello again, everyone, and thanks very much for being with us.

It is a very rare family that is not touched by cancer.

It has tormented the human race since time immemorial.

And while real progress has been made in combating cancer, so very much remains undone because so much about cancer remains unknown.

Some new cancer research is about to begin in our state, research that could provide some urgently needed answers, and we'll go to that subject in just a few moments.

But we begin this edition with a subject that everyone has heard about, but too few of us understand artificial intelligence.

Come fall, Arkansas's John Brown University at Siloam Springs will become the first campus in Arkansas, first University campus in Arkansas to offer a major in artificial intelligence.

Doctor Justus Sullivan is the chair of John Brown's Computer Science Department, and he joins us now.

Doctor, thanks very much for coming in.

How does a I differ from convert a major and a how will that differ from a major and just conventional computer science?

Okay.

Thanks for having me in your show.

Computer science.

We deal with computer languages, programing languages and technologies like database and software engineering, which aim towards producing software products of software applications.

But artificial intelligence by itself, or collection of software products and machines that simulate human thinking and problem solving abilities.

So it is it is one step ahead or up above the regular software applications that you use.

What makes human thinking process?

Yeah.

What's going to be the approach you take with this in the classroom or in the laboratory?

Okay, so since A.I.

is based on computer science or built upon computer science discipline, we teach the basic programing languages like Python, Java, C-sharp and of Technologies, and a few advanced frameworks and processes in these programing languages.

And top of this, we introduce database data structures and algorithms in which we train our students to solve problems using algorithms and using data bases and facts and rules so that we introduce the concepts and technologies like machine learning and deep learning and all of this stuff into the curriculum.

Well, John, John Brown is, of course, a faith based institution.

And in your announcement declaration that you will be offering a major in in artificial intelligence, you're going to offer it from a Christian perspective.

How will that different?

Explain that, if you would.

Okay.

So people think is evil and it is bad, but it is not because we are already using A.I.

in many forms, even like a decade or two decades from now.

So it is we are enjoying the advantages of of air, legs, Google Maps, or Google search engines or Amazon Alexa voice recognition systems, and even Apple's iPhone face recognition.

So we are already using air technology in our day to day life.

But when, Jim, you thought, why not?

We offer it as the major we searched, we did a research, a small research in what colleges offered, but only found that why not?

We offer A.I.

from the Christian perspective, like serving others and honoring God through through our vocation.

So we need people and brains that could think in that way, thinking in a Christian way, in solving problems, and also using technology you to the max to to the benefit of the community and to the society.

So that's where Jeb, you came forward to think about offering an AI as a full major from the Christian perspective.

So if I understand correctly, then you your the model will be to apply a eye toward denominational ends or towards philosophical or spiritual ends.

Yeah.

So apply apply AI in such a way that you serve the community first.

When I say serve the community.

I always used to tell my students, when you try to when you are trying to solve a problem using software or A.I.

technology have people as the central point.

So think about people.

And I say people first Think about as your family member as if you're offering a software product to your family member.

So in that way, you use your head and heart and hands for the glory of God.

And as well, you are serving your people.

So an institution or an entity, a force that we have that we call artificial intelligence, that and our computers as a whole, while they may be inherently or intrinsically value neutral, they can be applied to say, spiritual lands or to public service ends.

Yes.

And give us an example.

For example, if how would you anticipate that this might be the case or how it might be employed?

Okay.

So let me go with this example.

In the in the fall in the fall of 2010, until that was was introduced into the world like everybody was talking about, that started it again into our classrooms, into the assignments, into the coding exercises that you offered.

But is it that is it right or wrong?

We don't have a proper answer to that.

Is it ethical or is it spiritual?

Is it correct?

From the Christian point of view.

We don't have an answer for that yet.

But what as as as faculty from Jim, you what we do is that try to help students think and this the work that I do for my grade is my should be my own my own work so that I'm not using someone else for like a charge of these were or a prompt a prompt given to charge up.

It would give results.

But those results may not be right for an assignment.

So we encourage students to think in such a way that morally I should do my work.

To get grades is not wrong.

Using them to learn, but in order to get a grade that is, let us let students use their own thinking process instead of depending on someone else.

So that is considered a kind of plagiarism which goes against any institution's policies while they turn in their assignments or grading.

So in that way, we make sure that we help students to think on a on their own and improve their skill set and competencies.

And the technologies are in any programing languages that they learn inside the classroom, not only inside, but also outside the classroom, making them think in a Christian way and also making them think morally.

Well, yeah, there is, as we understand anyway, in your curriculum, computer curriculum, there is going to be a strong ethics component in there in terms of of the coursework of the instruction.

How is that going to work?

What can you go into that?

Just a bit.

Yeah.

So in JMU, for all the majors, including computer science and engineering, we say, or we practice this faith and integration in the teaching learning process, so it is not going to be new for it as well.

When we say faith and integration into the classroom set up, we teach scriptures along with the technology that we teach.

We take devotions, faculty, take devotion, teach devotions, and in the classroom.

So there's always going to be learning technology and also learning that from the Christian perspective, from the Scripture scriptures perspective.

But for I, we are we are also introducing ethics as an exclusive course for amateurs, so that that's going to be required course for grants, which is going to be offered from fall 2010.

Four, along with the Christian Perception Ethics course, is also going to be there.

So it is not inherently benign, though a lot of us are.

We see a sinister aura about artificial intelligence.

Is that not justified, at least to some extent, not ever.

But not everybody will have advantage.

It will be able to take advantage of the jobs ethics course in a I. Yeah.

So when when technology is when new innovations come in, people are like no, to do those innovations and new things come in when but when they start using it and using it ethically are using it the way that it should be used for the benefit of the society, then that technology becomes the day to day routine like search engine and calculator.

When they came in, it was not appreciated at the beginning, but then when it became a routine and if it was so helpful inside the classrooms and outside in our jobs, in our in our everyday lives, it is beneficial then these technologies are having a positive impact in our everyday life and also in our community overall.

A.I.

Where is it going to take us?

Do we even know?

Do we have a clue where A.I.

is going to take us as a society, as a culture, as a country, As a world?

Yeah.

But in the past, one and a half years, maybe one year, the A.I.

technology has spoken a lot that that wasn't really rapid and fast.

It does not know where it is going to go.

But what we can see is that it is going to make its presence everywhere.

Three decades back, computers were there, were making their presence everywhere.

You talk about hospitals, talk about business, banking, education, institutions, computers came in three decades ago, but now I know started.

It's going to be everywhere.

It's already been there in almost any business that you name in terms of machine learning, in terms of data analytics, finance, analytics, it is already there, but the future is going to be even more AI driven data that every business produces, like education institutions like JMU or healthcare industry or missionary manufacturing production, name any industry they're going to have.

They are having lots of data with which they are going to do analytics using model.

So what I see is into the future is going to be part of not only every day's activities as part of every business is every institution's thing where it has the potential to turn society just upside down.

Does it not?

Should we be afraid of it?

I guess that's what I'm asking.

No, it's nothing to be scary about that.

When we when we are scaling up to that level to use those tools.

Google searching was fantastic when it came.

We thought that is going to So is it going to take away all the libraries It did not.

So in the same way, we are just speculating whether it's going to turn all of the community and society upside down.

But it is not what we are invited to do or what you are call to do is that we ask people as grads or future engineers need to scale up their skills and competencies.

But these fast advancements of technologies and that'll be a better society.

That's what I think from from the perception of a researcher, from a person of an academic year.

Well, we thank you so much for explaining it for us.

Good luck with the program, Doctor.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Dr. Justice Sullivan, thank you for joining us from Siloam Springs at John Brown University.

Thanks very much.

You're welcome.

And we'll be back in a moment.

We are back.

What causes cancer?

What drives it?

Sometimes exponential growth.

Why do some people get cancer and others don't?

Even with similar or even identical lifestyles and environments, some things we know tobacco is not a good idea, for example, nor ingesting any number of everyday household chemicals.

But a million mysteries remain.

And one of the biggest is why cancer cells behave as they do.

To try to answer that and other questions about cancer.

The federal government has sent the University of Arkansas for medical Sciences more than $11 million to create a center that will study malignancy at the molecular level.

With us is the man in charge of the mission, Dr. Robert Off, director, and Dr. Eric Atmar, who is the core director Sidekicks speak at Uams, the Center for Molecular Interactions in Cancer.

All of it above my pay grade.

But gentlemen, thank you for coming in.

Is it are we in a situation where we can't possibly understand cancer until we understand the cell?

And it is still a mystery?

Dr. Rolf, we'll begin with you.

So, yeah, certainly understanding things at the molecular level gives us more precise understanding of cancer.

Is that the only thing that we need in our arsenal to address this complex and heterogenous set of diseases?

No, but it's a great tool to have, and that's something that we hope to build capacity for with this grant.

Yeah.

What are we going to do?

I mean, what?

So how to approach this?

I mean, you're coming at it from two angles, right?

Right.

So our approach is to come at it from a very basic science perspective.

We are fortunate in this particular center to have some clinician scientists on board with our team so that the basic research that we're doing, you know, doesn't lose sight of the clinical perspective, the end point and goals that we want to achieve in terms of finding better ways to identify, treat and ultimately cure different types of cancer.

But what we're building specifically with this with this grant, which it's a grant that's funded by the National Institutes for General Medical Sciences.

So in GM's through a program called the Institutional Development Award or the IDEA Program and a little bit of history.

This is a program that was spawned originally.

It was conceived by a congressman from Arkansas, Congressman Ray Thornton.

So he started the or led the charge for starting the escort program.

And that's morphed and evolved.

And so now we have the IDEA program.

So we can trace the lineage of our Center for Molecular Interactions in Cancer all the way back to Congressman Thorton back in the 1970s.

Back in the seventies.

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

But what we're trying to build is infrastructure.

So bring in young faculty, new faculty with exciting ideas who are all studying cancer.

So we have folks that are studying different aspects of lung cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, trying to understand why blood borne cancer, the same pathway in a blood borne cancer, might behave differently in a solid tumor and ultimately leverage that to improve diagnostics and therapies, but are a key tool in our arsenal.

And that's where Dr. Marcus, an expert, is on structural biology.

So mapping the three dimensional structure of these molecules that are in our cells and they're behaving differently, they're interacting with different proteins in a tumor cell versus a non tumor cell.

And so trying to map the three dimensional topography with the tools that we're going to build with this grant is is a major goal for Dr. and Pathway.

Yeah.

Yes.

So we have within this program this this grant, there's several investigators who have expertise in varying types of cancers in the cells.

And what our what we're trying to bring to them is the structure biology techniques, which they don't know how to apply as well.

And so we're going to bring those techniques to them to be able to study the proteins that are involved in the cancers that they're studying, sort of see if I'm oversimplifying it here, this is a coffee cup.

Okay, But why is it a coffee cup?

Is that sort of where we're headed?

So and the investigators, they know they may have an idea and know very well which proteins that are involved in the malignancies they're studying, but they might not be able to see at a molecular level why they what the problems they may have these part of this thing come together.

How do they how do things how do these things work together?

How do they interact with other partners in the cell?

And so that's what structure biology can provide is a real image of the molecule of the proteins themselves that are participating in these processes.

All right.

Are we still at I think we the President Biden declared war on cancer not terribly long ago, but I seem to recall a president about 40 or 50 years ago declare doing the same war.

How far ahead are we then today than we were, say, a generation, three generations ago?

If we got a better handle on this, this plague, this.

So certainly there have been many advances.

And you can see that in survival rates and outcomes for a multitude of different types of cancer cancers that used to be incurable, that now we can cure.

But I would say the thing that we know now that we didn't know back then is what I alluded to earlier.

Cancer isn't one disease.

There's no silver bullet or it's I think we would most people would agree, most scientists and clinicians would agree.

What's going to be effective for treating somebody with advanced stage lung cancer is going to be different for somebody with multiple myeloma.

It's a complex set of heterogenous diseases.

And even within a tumor you have different populations of cells.

You might be able to get rid of one population, but then the other population thrives later on and the cancer comes back.

So the war is ongoing.

We have some better tools.

We certainly have.

And that's one of the beauties of this particular grant is or what we're trying to accomplish here, is the tool sets that we have now allow us to ask more complex questions and understand like he was talking about a protein that might be different in a tumor cell versus a healthy tissue.

We can not only better study that one protein, but now we have tools where those proteins are interacting with other proteins or nucleic acids.

And the tools, the instrumentation and structural biology and other molecular types of approaches, those tools have advanced to the point where we can study those complexes more effectively.

Whereas in the past we might have been able to get to that point.

But it was extremely challenging and labor intensive.

And now we've got robotics to help us to speed up the pipeline again, to ask more complicated questions and get the answers faster.

For all its sinister applications, I guess, or there's there's a shroud of the sinister around artificial intelligence, but you'll be using this doctrine on a market to no small extent.

Right.

So we have it's an important part of the technique of crime, uses machines that use artificial eye adapted for artificial intelligence.

And some of this does go into that.

Those types of determinations of structures so we can see the markets we're interested in.

Yeah, what are we?

So we're not necessarily at still at the point where we don't know, what we don't know about about cancer?

Mm hmm.

There's much that we don't know, but but there is.

We the aggregate knowledge is increasing, I think.

Yeah.

So knowledge is always increasing.

But I think we're always finding things that we didn't realize, we didn't know.

This is true.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I would completely agree with shining the light on the things that we didn't know.

We continue, as Doctor and Mark alluded to, to shine the light in places and oh, we didn't know that.

And again, part of that goes back to just the sensitivity, the high throughput nature of not just structural biology, but technology in general associated biomedical research.

We can detect things at a lower level.

We can do things more quickly.

So I think that leads to us, you know, discovering more undiscovered countries.

So one door opened and leads to another corridor.

Yeah, but the advent of computational biology, AI, those sorts of things, I think really help us to understand this, where we're moving towards the time when we can better understand those complex data sets where you've got tens or hundreds of thousands of data points.

And making sense of that is exceptionally challenging.

But we're we're getting to that point where we can better understand that if there is a next stage of your research.

Dr.. What what would it be?

Is there is there is there a plateau, an immediate plateau in a way, and from there you'll move on to the next week.

Is it possible to even speculate as to what that would be?

So, you know, I think it's important to put it within the context of what is the purpose of this grant, of this award, of this center and the number one goal of this center is to build a community of scientists.

So build research research programs all in a thematic area.

And so the next stage for us is we have our junior faculty that are supported by this grant, and they get another grant and they're able to build a rigorous, world renowned research program, and then we recruit in somebody else to fill their slot.

And so we're just bringing in more minds, more ideas, as well as building the technical side of it with the tools that Eric's going to build.

Yeah.

What made you, Ames, a good launching pad for this?

What?

What made our facility attractive to.

To the federal health establishment?

Well, one thing that has been going on at UMass is it's been really investing in its cancer center program.

And so we we were able to have a lot of infrastructure built to do structural biology and other approaches that the center is now going to use.

And so I think the federal government can see that we've already made a major investment and have these techniques operational here.

And we now just need to plug in the investigators that Dr. Ulf was talking about.

They can now it's all set up and ready to go.

Yeah, we're not talking about a two month project here.

I mean, the span of the initial span, anyway, is what, five years?

Yes, sir.

So this is a five year.

It's called phase one.

And ultimately, the the way this award mechanism is designed is for potentially three five year phases.

And ultimately in the third phase, you've built something that's self-sustaining and you've got this community of people all thinking about similar sorts of things and bouncing ideas off of each other.

And in this case, hopefully making an impact on cancer.

Diagnosis, treatment for Arkansans.

All right, gentlemen, the best of luck to both of you.

And I hope you'll come back soon and keep us posted.

Thanks very much.

Thanks very much for being with us.

Appreciate it.

And as always, we thank you for joining us.

See you next time.

Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio.