ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE PAST, PRESENT & POSSIBLE FUTURE
Opening Welcome:
President Doug opened the meeting by telling us that if we ever want to feel inferior, just look at a flower.
Guests:
John Moffat introduced our speaker Chuck Robinson
George Halsell introduced his wife Melanie, who joined the Rotary Brass and potential member Pete Kirkman
Felicity Dye introduced Rotaract Rotarians, Lily Storbeck and McKenzie Harris
Members on Zoom: Dick Tucker, Catherine Riordan, Shauna Naf, John Pedlow and Nathan Twining
Club Events and Committee Announcements
There will be an event on May 18 to clean up Memorial Park. There is urgent need for participants.
May 18th 9:00 am - 12:00 noon
Our Club has been instrumental in keeping Sunnyland Memorial Park looking sharp as we head into summer and the Memorial Day holiday. Memorial Park was established to honor those lost during World War I and has since become a place of remembrance, honoring those who have fallen in service to our country during war.
Please join us, City of Bellingham volunteers, and Sunnyland neighbors as we remove moss from remembrance stones, sweep away fallen leaves, pull some weeds, and help the park look its best.
You will first need to sign up for an account if they don’t have one, sign the waiver, then they can use that link to register for the event.
The city is listing us as a co-sponsor on their website, so we need to make sure we have a great turnout.
Let Ward Naf know if you can participate or have questions.
Doug gave the results of our meal packing event on Saturday, May 4. We packed 41,256 meals for people in Sierra Leone. Doug gave thanks to the 100 volunteers, including many club members, and organizers Roland Trenouth and Marty Haines.
The District 5050 conference took place on Saturday, May 4, in Mount Vernon. Doug Cole, Steve Ban, Felicity Dye and John Moffat attended from our club. Next year the conference will take place at the Tulalip Resort Casino in Marysville.
RCOB will be part of the downtown Memorial Day Parade on Saturday, May 25, from 12:00 noon to 3:00 p.m. Members are encouraged to sign up to walk in the parade on the website at: bellinghamrotary.org or https://portal.clubrunner.ca/264/Event/memorial-day-parade
The Executive Board is looking for nominations for the club’s Major Awards. People are encouraged to consider the criteria and send nominations to Executive Secretary Sandee Lindhout or the Executive Board: Doug Cole, Paul Grey, Steve Ban, John Moffat or Steve Gray. Nominations will be accepted through mid-May. Click Here for List of previous awardees
Youth Programs.Felicity introduced Rotaract students Lily Storbeck and McKenzie Harris. Dawnlynn Chadwick will be the outbound student this fall. JV will be our representative to RYLA and he has transportation to Canada.
Paul Harris Fellow!
Steve Ban was awarded his first Paul Harris Fellowship. Congratulations Steve!
May 7, 2024 Board Meeting Briefs
The Membership Application for Pete Kirkman proposed by Del VandeKerk and George Halsell to fill the classification “Education-Music” was approved by the Classification Committee and the Board of Directors. He will be eligible for membership May 20, 2024 unless written objection is received by Sandra Lindhout, 2200 Vining St., Bellingham, Wa 98229 on or before May 18, 2024.
Sandee presented some minor changes to the Rotary Club of Bellingham Policy Manual, and it was approved.
The Board approved a donation to the Assumption Church for the use of the Gym for the meal packing event in the amount of $200.00.
The 2024-2025 Proposed Club and RCOB Foundation budgets were presented and approved.
EVENTS:
Community Boating Center Wheelhouse Donor Celebration: An opportunity to celebrate our 2021-2022 Fundraising efforts!!
Special invite: We are in the final stretch of the construction phase of our Wheelhouse and the end is in sight! Thanks to your support the building will be finished and open for "business" by the end of next week! We'd love to invite you to come by and celebrate!
Join us for a donor celebration event to express our heartfelt gratitude for your support of the Wheelhouse Campaign.
Date: Thursday, May 9th, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: Community Boating Center's NEW Wheelhouse
Enjoy an evening of wine, beer, and bites as we come together to celebrate your generosity and our collective achievement! Take a tour of the newly finished facility, mingle with fellow supporters, and experience the impact of your contributions.
Prexy Doug put in a plug for the Memorial Day Parade, encouraging all members to get out there and walk. Walk like you mean it. We have a Rotary float, which we escort over the mile-long parade. If you start conditioning now, you will be in shape to even run laps around the float as it careens down the route.
Larry Halgren gave a Rotary Moment. Larry recalled that during his tenure as RCOB President in 1995-96, one of the projects the club did was the installation of a fish ladder in Whatcom Creek just north of the old Haskell Business Park. Bellingham Marine Industries built the ladder. Club members in the trucking industry supplied a truck to transport the ladder to the creek. However, it turned out that the ladder was too heavy for the crane to lift it out of the truck. Someone called a friend at ARCO (on a Saturday) and prevailed on that person to bring a bigger crane to the site. After a two-hour or so wait, the larger crane arrived. It was up to the job and the fish ladder was lifted into the creek.
Larry showed photos from the original installation and also recent photos showing the fish ladder as it currently exists.
When it was installed, they had to place it so as not to disturb a sewer line. It still provides 100% fish passage to this day.
Bellingham Rotaract Presentation
Lily Storbeck, VP of Community Service and McKenzie Harris, VP of Rotary and AS Affairs gave a presentation about the Bellingham Rotaract Club. The club gives a high priority to recruitment and retention. After the last school year, membership was down to 4 people. Now it is up to 12. Coordination with the RCOB is difficult because they have to follow the school calendar, not the Rotary calendar. They work hard to assure that their meetings balance consistency and variety. They love to do community service projects, particularly outdoors. Some of the ones they have done involve park cleaning, native plant sales, weed and feed events, visiting Rotary clubs, attending Oyster Fest ’24, the meal packing event last Saturday and working at Camp Korey on Sunday through the District conference. They also work with the Food Pantry at WCC.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE PAST, PRESENT & POSSIBLE FUTURE
Program: John Moffat introduced Chuck Robinson, former owner of Village Books, who gave today’s program on Artificial Intelligence: The Past, Present, and Possible Future.
After disclaiming expertise in computers, Chuck started his program by stating that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been with us for centuries. In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical calculating machine (the Pascaline). In 1837, Charles Babbage and Ada King Lovelace (considered to be the first programmer) invented the programmable machine (calculator). In 1943, Warren McCulloch (a neurophysiologist) and Walter Pitts (a logician) drew parallels between the brain and computing machines. In 1950, Alan Turing created the Turing Test as a way of testing a machine’s intelligence, i.e., how closely a machine can replicate human reasoning. Responding to questions from a human interrogator, Turing studied how closely a machine reasons and presents analysis as a human would.
In 1956, a conference at Dartmouth College brought together ten men who were considered the founding fathers of AI, which they described as: “To proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”
Chuck said that AI is NOT (1) magic, because it is based on mathematical algorithms and data analysis; (2) all-knowing, because it can only be based on data available to it; (3) infallible, because all systems can make mistakes; or (4) always autonomous, because it needs human input and oversight.
AI has been defined as “the field of computer science that focuses on creating machines that can perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as problem-solving, pattern recognition and decision-making.”
Chuck said there are six types of AI:
Machine learning (3 types – supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement);
Neural network (e.g., cameras on iphones or self-driving cars);
Robotics (using machines to do tasks) in the following fields: domestic, medical, educational, hospitality, entertainment, and industrial;
Expert systems (a human expert/knowledge engineer build a knowledge basis leading to an inference engine and a user interface). Examples are help desk management, information management, airline and cargo scheduling, loan analysis, stock market trading, and planning and scheduling;
Fuzzy logic (the opposite of Boolean logic, where an answer is either yes or no), which has degrees of correctness. This has use in spacecraft and satellite altitude control, handwriting recognition, washing machines, control of arterial pressure during anesthesia, and flow and mixture regulation in aircraft de-icing vehicles;
Natural Language Processing (e.g., building words and analyzing texts, using automatic voices like Lexa or Siri). Applications of this are used in spam detection, machine translation, social media sentiment analysis, text summarization, chatbots, and virtual agents.
AI is used in many different fields, such as:
Cyber security – AI continuously learns, finds threats faster, and eliminates time-consuming tasks;
Business – spam filters, smart email categorization, voice-to-text features, smart personal assistants (Siri), sales and business forecasting, and security surveillance.
Marketing
Health care
Education.
AI can make mistakes and be biased, leading to biased outcomes. There are ethical issues with AI, which is a topic for another day.
Thank you, Chuck, for a thought-provoking discussion.
Closing:
President Doug thanked those who helped with the meeting and rang the adjournment bell at 1:30. Boy that guy can touchdown on time!
RCOB apparel, including polo shirts, dress shirts, vests and hats is now available. These are items that every Club member simply must have in his/her wardrobe! Besides looking great, Club members will be contributing to branding for the RCOB as well as supporting our Club's Foundation, which will receive part of the proceeds.
Click on the button below for the the clothing catalogue, with the Order Form on the last page. Fill out the order form, turn it into Vinson Latimore at a meeting or email a scanned copy to embroidery@choicesscrubs.com.
Rotary Moment
