The World I See - Dr. Fei-Fei Li

 Sub-title: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

This was a wonderful read that sheds a bright light on the early innovations in AI and one of its fascinating developers.  Dr Li weaves the story of her immigration and experiences in the US with the evolution of the technology.  She beautifully illustrates the power of family, mentors, and self-determination on realizing the intellect of a brilliant woman.  Highly recommended.

Quotes/Notes:

[on her mentor helping her and learning about her culture]..he read Chinese classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West.

"But the failures are not in vain.  Mistakes trigger corrective signals, rippling across the network's tens of millions of constituent parts, each assessed for its contribution to the results and pushed, proportionately, to behave differently next time.  It's the simplest form of learning--to do less of whatever failed, and more of whatever didn't."

[on psychologist Eleanor Rosch and categorization and creating a vocabulary for understanding hierarchy - made me think of looking at DNA this way] "..superordinates and subordinate categories ..when taken as a whole, such hierarchies look like trees.  Moving toward the root means less specificity and differentiation, while moving toward the leaves, the farthest ends of each branch means more. "

[Anatol Holt] "AI was a technology that can make the perfect chess move while the room is on fire".

[on Jeremy Wolfe, cognitive scientist - made me think of doing a study on how blind and deaf perceive the world] "...concept of 'gist' ...directly confronted the question of what, exactly, humans perceive when they glance at the real world"  

"adversarial attacks" -  feeding information to directly confuse the AI

"explainability" or "explainable AI" - reducing neural networks' almost magical deliberations into a form humans can understand.

Published: 2023 Read: January 2024 Genre: Science

The Glass Universe - Dava Sobel

Sub-title: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory took the Measure of the Stars

I got this book just over a year ago at the Tucson book fair, a recommendation from my brother-in-law, Tom.  I really enjoyed the author's other books that I read, Longitude and Galileo's Daughter. 

This novel tells the history of the women who worked at the Harvard Observatory analyzing and cataloging glass plate images of the stars. The plates were created by images captured by the observatory's telescopes in Massachusetts, Peru and South Africa.  Over 500,000 plates were created over several decades, a collection that is now being digitized including the paper sleeves they are stored in and the accompanying notes and card files.

The original observatory's efforts were made possible by ongoing donations from Anna Draper, the wife of Henry Draper, in honor of her husband.  She was very involved throughout the rest of her life in the programs.  Many women worked as "computers" to analyze and record the information on the stars.  It made me realize that astronomy involves a lot of math and physics.  I was struck with the education and skills of these women in the late 1800's and into the early 20th century and compared them in my mind to my women ancestors of the time, most of whom did not even go to high school.

There's mention of a Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin that I'll have to research as "Yerkes" is the middle name of my 2nd great-grandfather.

The women were not treated as second-class, although their pay was far less than their male counterparts.  The author features several who received doctorates in Astronomy and were instrumental in developing techniques for quantifying and cataloging the stars and who discovered many. 

A good read and history lesson.

Published:  2016  Read: July 2018  Genre: non-fiction, science