Two assistant professors at Iowa State will use recently received grants to further their respective research of artificial intelligence and immune system processes.

Nikki Pohl, assistant professor of chemistry, and Jin Tian, assistant professor of computer science, were chosen to receive Faculty Early Career Awards, awards given by the National Science Foundation to deserving assistant professors in science fields.

The two were notified in February they would receive five-year grants of nearly $500,000 each to help them increase their research capabilities in their respective fields.

Tian said he was awarded $455,000 to use during his next five years of research. Tian’s award-winning proposal focused on the area of causal reasoning, which Tian said is the analysis of cause-and-effect communication relationships between artificial intelligence machines.

“The idea is with artificial intelligence, finding out if artificial intelligence machines can act like humans,” Tian said.

“We are not going to do experiments with real robots, but we will just develop theoretical foundations.”

Tian said the plan is to see how scientists can create an efficient model, which robots can use to communicate with one another.

“With humans, we have language, and we try to explain certain things to each other, and this is a tough problem with computers because it is difficult to make a mathematical solution to this,” Tian said. “To make robots understand each other, we need to find what mathematical model they best understand. I’m using the graphical model [in the research].”

Tian said the research he will do has applications in the social science and the health science fields, where his results can be used to analyze cause-and-effect relationships, such as what medical treatments are the most effective in terms of curing disease.

Pohl said she was notified she would be awarded $510,000 to use during her five-year research plan.

She said she will use the money to focus on researching carbohydrate binding, the process in which long strings of carbohydrates build on one another to form glycocode. Glycocode is an identifier of biological objects found on objects’ surfaces.

She will also research the catalysis (decay) by enzymes — the speed of the chemical reaction of glycocodes — while conducting the first comparative study of these actions inside three types of bodies — eukaryotes, organisms with membrane-bound nuclei; bacteria, which do not have membrane-bound nuclei; and archea, a form of bacteria that live in extreme environments.

Pohl said carbohydrates have two main purposes. One is energy storage, and the other is the production of cell surface glycocodes, which are used to identify biological objects, such as fungi, bacteria or viruses. She said the purpose of coding has only recently been discovered.

“There has been a slow appreciation over many decades that there were carbohydrate codes,” Pohl said.

“Glycobiology has really taken off in the last ten years, and new tools have enabled us to study sugars more easily.”

Pohl said one of the first things the immune system of humans recognizes when a biological object enters the body is its carbohydrate code. This object may attempt to attack the body, in which case the immune system reads the code and is alerted to take action against it. However, certain objects have tools to work around this immune system reaction. Some bacteria can do this, Pohl said, by using their own enzymes to change their coding, enabling them to mimic cells that fool the immune system, causing the bacteria to be ignored by the system.

Pohl said this research will possibly lead to many applications in the medical field.

“When we know what the difference is between bacteria and eukaryotes, we are able to see how bacteria create their own codes to evade the system, so we can create medicine to stop that,” Pohl said