Chapter 417
After greeting Stewart, Professor Hancock, and the others, Charlene took her seat at the front of the hall, right near the center aisle. Stewart joined her, while Vesta ended up in the second row.
As rising stars in the field, both Charlene and Stewart had been invited onstage to share their approaches to research and learning, hoping to inspire the students in the audience.
Once their talks wrapped up and the floor opened for discussion, it wasn’t long before the leading experts in the room all gravitated toward Charlene and Stewart, eager to speak with them.
These were well-known scholars, each with their own specialty. Whether the conversation turned to convolutional neural networks, embodied intelligence, multimodal interaction, or some other cutting-edge topic, Charlene held her own with ease. She offered fresh perspectives and practical suggestions for thorny issues-like missing modalities or computational bottlenecks-that had been troubling even the most seasoned researchers. With every answer, the experts’ eyes lit up, and it seemed they’d have happily talked with her all afternoon.
There were plenty of heavyweights in attendance, and it didn’t take long for them to judge Charlene’s capabilities. Just a few minutes in conversation, and her depth was obvious.
At one point, a scholar waiting his turn grumbled, “Alright, Sinclair, you’ve monopolized her long enough. It’s my turn, isn’t it?”
“Exactly! Let the rest of us have a chance. You can’t keep her to yourself forever.”
“Relax, I just have one more question, let me finish-“
“Oh, please! I know exactly what you’re going to ask: how to fix problems with scaling up applications. That could go on forever. By the time you’re done, we’ll all be old!”
Meanwhile, Vesta was fielding her own conversations, though her mind kept wandering to the front row. She found herself watching Charlene almost unconsciously, tracking every exchange and gesture. So when someone called her name, she didn’t respond right away.
“Vesta,” Maureen Spencer, who had come with her, nudged her gently. “Teague wants to ask you something.”
Snapping out of her reverie, Vesta smiled apologetically. “Sorry, Teague. I got a little too absorbed in their discussion up there, couldn’t help myself.”
Teague laughed it off. “No worries, it’s fascinating stuff.”
Once she’d regained her focus, Vesta dove back into conversation with Teague, but Maureen, ever the perceptive mother, had already noticed that Vesta had seemed distracted for at least half an hour. She had a pretty good idea why. She’d caught bits of the chatter about Charlene, and she could see for herself how the top experts were vying to speak with her.
After Teague moved on, Maureen glanced over at Charlene and leaned in. “What’s going on?” she asked quietly.
Vesta pulled her gaze back and said, “Now I understand why Professor Mack and Professor Hancock spoke so highly of Charlene the other day. She really does seem to have something special.”
Several of the experts clustered around Charlene were familiar to Vesta by reputation. They had strong track records and impressive résumés. The fact that they not only sought out Charlene’s input but clearly valued her advice made a big impression. The more Vesta listened, the more she realized just how broad and deep Charlene’s knowledge was; there were entire stretches she couldn’t even follow.
No wonder Professor Mack had called her a ‘polymath’ in AI.
If, at The Henderson Group a few days ago, Charlene’s technical talk with Professor Hancock and the others had relied on secondhand insights from Stewart or Kenton, now she was clearly in a league of her own. Her conversation with Professor Sinclair and the others was too informed, too wide-ranging, to be mere parroting.
Maureen paused, her expression unreadable as she looked toward the knot of experts around Charlene. “Well,” she said quietly, “she’s been with Stewart for ages now, always tagging along when he meets with Kenton. With two of the best minds in the field mentoring her, of course, she’s come this far. Isn’t that only natural? Otherwise, why would she go to such lengths to keep you and Stewart apart?”
She squeezed Vesta’s hand. “Honestly, if you’d had the same access to Stewart and Kenton, I’m sure you’d have done even better than she has.”