Rotary Club of Mountain ViewApril 4th, 2023 President’s Greeting by Sanjay: Welcome to the Rotary Club of Mountain View where: We’re More Than A Club…We’re a Family!!! President's report out:
5/20 - Area 9 Service Project will be from 7-9am or 8:45-11am at Hope's CornerSanjay is organizing the Scholarship Program and needs reads for Los Altos High, Mountain View High, Alta Vista and St. Francis applicants. Please let Sanjay know if you are interested.
The Mountain View Public Safety Foundation is holding a 5K Run and needs volunteers on 5/6. After the Run, there will be a Youth Extravaganza. Please let Sanjay know if you can volunteer.
Member Twana Karney's husband Bruce is being honored at the Mountain View Chamber's Celebration of Leaders Event on 5/4 5:30-9:30pm. Sanjay encouraged members to attend the event to support Bruce.
During the month of April, there will be a clothing drive for Hope's Corner. Please bring items to a meeting or let Sanjay know if you have items you would like to donate.
4/29 is the District Conference. The MV Rotary Club will pay for a member and guest to attend at $220. You will be reimbursed if you sign up.
Scott announced that the Annual Speech contest for the next level will be on 4/5/2023 hosted by the Los Altos Sunset Rotary club at the Courtyard by Marriott. Sanjay, Judy, Tom and Scott will be attending to support our winner.
Camp RYLA is coming up and MV will be sending two students - Dolga Somas from MVHS and Clare Florio from St Francis.
Speaker:Sanjay introduced our very own Bert Rafael, who shared his insights on Artificial Intelligence(AI). Bert was born in 1936 in New York. He received his BS in physics from the RPI, and an MS degree in Applied Math from Brown University and he was a student of Marvin Minsky MIT and received his PhD in mathematics in 1964. After completing his Ph.D. at MIT, he was at UC Berkeley for an academic year, and subsequently joined SRI full-time in April, 1965. He was a long-time member of SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center and was its director from 1970 to 1973. While at SRI, he helped invent the A* search algorithm and developed Shakey the robot, which was one of the first projects sponsored by DARPA. He also co-founded the Journal of Artificial Intelligence. From 1980 to 1990 Burt worked as a research manager at Hewlett Packard. From 1990 to 1997 he helped his wife, Anne, operate Compass Point Travel Inc., a business that she had founded in 1980. He was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Vienna during 1973 and 1974.
Bert shared the origins of Chat DPT as part of language AI back in the 1956's. In 1954, the idea of AI was born as leading academics like John McCarthy discussed the concept. In 1957, Professor Rosenblatt invented Perceptron, the idea of simulated neurons and the the use of feeders of information other than the keyboard, i.e. TV pictures. In 1965, Gordon Moore founded Intel and the idea of putting circuits on a chip. The doubling of the number of chips every two years became the Moore's Law which has held up to this day. Other inventions during this era were computers programmed to make decisions - GPS - general program solver. At MIT, a TV was connected to provide digitized feed into a computer and the computer was able to say "hello". Stanford was working on a computer controlled car. The Department of Defense wanted a computer to look at aerial photos to locate tanks. But then in 1974, the Government stopped funding AI which was called the AI winter. In the 1960's there was a focus on games. Arthur Samuel at IBM designed a computer that could play checkers and in 1994, a computer beat a human. In the 1980's, computers using memorization learned to play chess, and a computer beat the human champion in 1996. In 2016, Google's Deep Minds beat the world champion of the game Go. The last five-ten years has been an AI spring with a focus on language. The English language has been recorded into digital form using language from newspapers, but computers look at word recognition so the meaning is not quite accurate.
We are fortunate to have such a distinguished pioneer of AI in our Rotary Club! Thank you Bert!