Spring 2024 Computer Science 458 Introduction. 2/7/2024

Canvas Quiz of the Day (need daily password)

Most days, there will be a simple canvas quiz related to the lecture. You need a password to activate the quiz, which I will provide in class. These quizzes will count toward your class participation grade. The quiz is available only during class.

Click for today's quiz.

Also, you will earn class participation points for posting to Discussions (not Ed Discussions.)

Administrivia

I have office hours Mondays and Wednesdays from 2-3 pm, on zoom, id 459 434 2854.

Complete the online student information sheet. Note: the previous form was not working. Please submit again. Thanks.

Yale Information Society Project Free lunch.

Thursday, February 8, 2024 - 12:00PM-1:30PM - Baker Hall 405
The AI Mirror: Shards of Humanity in the Digital Ether
Nisheeth Vishnoi, A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science at Yale University

Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me. NYTimes review of https://www.perplexity.ai/

Assignments

Assignments: hw 1 and hw2 is now available.

Upcoming Guest lecture: Joanne Lipman and Rebecca Distler: Monday February 12th

JOANNE LIPMAN
Author & journalist who has served as Editor-in-Chief of USA Today, USA Today Network, Conde Nast Portfolio, and The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal. Currently an on-air CNBC contributor and Yale University journalism lecturer.
Bestselling author of That’s What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together and Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. Yale BA ‘83.
Joanne will speak on AI & the media: its perils (ie misinformation); its potential (ie rebuilding local news media); and the surprising results when she assigned her journalism students to use it for their reporting
REBECCA DISTLER
Strategist for AI & Digital Health at the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, a philanthropy focused on advancing AI for social impact. Served as Director of Global Health Initiatives at Element Inc, an AI digital identity company.
Background in public health and technology, including work with organizations like WHO, Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Yale BA’12 & Yale MPH’13.
Rebecca will discuss AI & public health: AI & decision-making in public health, with case studies.

We will go out to dinner afterwards at Villa Lulu, 230 College Street. We will have an in-person lottery in class on Wednesday to select students coming to dinner. The alternates for Monday's dinner alternates get an automatic invitation. (Ron Cheng and Sydney Scheller).

John Niccolai Follow Up

The Citadel early careers recruiter dedicated to Yale is: Anthony Tutwiler Anthony.Tutwiler@citadel.com You may contact him directly to find out more about positions at Citadel.

Financial jargon. Some of the following were in John's talk. (Some were not.)

On-the-run
OTC
FX
VIX Ticker: ^VIX
swaps
Open the kimono
Green on the screen
Long term capital and Russian deb crisis.
Bonds have interest, principle, and maturity.
Bid/Ask spread
CME
CBOE
Commodities
MD
PWM
Yield

AI and Intentionality: The Chinese Room

See Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence John Searle, talk at Google. See 9 minutes in for discussion of cognitive science and Sloan talks at Yale.

See Minds, brains, and programs John R. Searle, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1980).

The Yale AI Project: Cognitive Modelling

See The Yale Artificial Intelligence Project: A Brief History Stephen Slade, AI Magazine, 1987.

See Conceptual Dependency and Its Descendants Steven Lytinen, 1992.

Conceptual Dependency (CD) (slides)
MARGIE: parse English into CD, infer other concepts, generate natural languge (English and German, later Chinese)
- Task Orientation
- Psychological process model
- Canonical representation of knowledge
- Translation, synonomy, paraphrase
- Inference
- Ambiguity
Scripts, plans, goals and understanding (the book Searle read)
- Scripts: SAM, FRUMP
- Plans: PAM, TALESPIN
  One day Joe Bear was hungry. He asked his friend Irving Bird where some honey was. Irving told him there was a beehive in the oak tree. Joe threatened to hit Irving if he didn’t tell him where some honey was.
  One day Joe Bear was hungry. He asked his friend Irving Bird where some honey was. Irving told him there was a beehive in the oak tree. Joe walked to the oak tree. He ate the beehive.
Learning, memory, and explantion
- Memory Organization Packets (MOPS)
- Bower, Black, and Turner
- CYRUS
- IPP
- Case-based systems (later topic)

The Realm of Decisions

For the next class and the coming weeks: Give an example of an explanation you thought interesting because it was especially good or bad. It can be personal or from the news. Use the Discussions section of canvas (not Ed Discussion). You earn a quiz point by posting to Discussions.

What is a correct decision? See A Realistic Model of Rationality. This short paper provides a high-level introduction to the topics we will discuss in this course: goals, plans, resources, relationships, goal adoption, explanations, subjective decisions, emotions, advice, and persuasion. We contrast it with the standard economic decision theory. We want to develop a theory that can be implemented in a computer program.

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