John Cobb & Friends Gathering: George Strawn
June 11, 2024 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm PDT
June 11, 2024 @ 10:00 am – 12:00 pm PDT
Topic: AI Today Means Machine Learning
Presenters: George Strawn
George Strawn is a life-long professional computer scientist who also has a keen life-long interest in History, Philosophy, Religion, Physics, and Biology. As a former trustee of the Claremont School of Theology, he counts it a privilege to know John Cobb, and to have participated in the 2015 Claremont conference, “Seizing an Alternative.” He says, “After 80 years of development, Machine Learning may have reached an ‘inflection point,’ called Generative AI—that is, rather than just finding cute cat pictures on the Web, it can generate cute cat pictures from scratch. It can also generate articles, computer programs, and other artifacts that we thought only humans could create.” In Tuesday’s talk George Strawn will relate the history of this important development, describe how complicated it is on the inside, and how simple and powerful it is on the outside.
George Strawn has been a life-long professional computer scientist. For 30 years he was on the faculty of Iowa State University’s Department of Computer Science, where he was sometime department chair and director of the computer lab. For another 30 years he served at the National Science Foundation, assisted the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, and worked with the National Academy of Science. See this article about his Distinguished Service Award from ISU.
Prior to joining the Academies, Strawn was the director of the National Coordination Office (NCO) for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program and co-chair of the NITRD interagency committee. Strawn held these positions while on leave from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Whitehouse.
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