This week's sergeant-at-arms Walley Temple called our meeting, the tenth of the 2019-20 Rotary year, to order. President Rick Erven introduced his head table, while Michael Pierson and Manon Mitchell led us in singing O Canada. Sheila Taylor delivered the invocation.
President Rick thanked our meeting volunteers David Leslie, Bob Taylor and Murray Young.
Club secretary Jennifer Lavier Jankovic welcomed visiting Rotarians Sandi Kennedy and Jim Campbell from the Rotary Club of Okotoks and welcomed this week's guests. Three members are celebrating birthdays this week.
Did you know our club supports the Curly Galbraith Global Memorial? The memorial fund, established in partnership with Doris Galbraith and other family members, honours the memory of our past club president, District 5360 Governor and RI Director, Curly Galbraith.
The CGGM supports AIDS orphans in Uganda in their post-secondary studies. You can learn the full story of this amazing legacy project at www.educatingaidsorphans.org.
Announcements:
President Rick announced the opening of nominations for the office of Club President for the 2021-2022 Rotary Year.
Greg Stevenson issued a call for volunteers for the upcoming Beat Beethoven fundraising barbecue on September 12th.
The Waterton Glacier International Peace Park Assembly takes place over the weekend of September 13th to the 15th.
The United Way's Plane Pull fundraiser in support of Calgary's Community Hubs takes place on September 15th.
Our Adopt-a-Highway fellowship event takes place on September 21st.
Catherine Sheers and Manon Mitchell reminded us that (un)Gala is still accepting silent auction items.
Sandi Kennedy announced the Rotary Club of Okotoks is selling raffle tickets for a 1929 President's Edition Studebaker. Tickets are available for $20 from the Rotary Club of Okotoks.
The period for nominations for the office of President for the Rotary year 2021-2022 is open.
The nominating committee will choose a member to serve as Club President. Any eligible member of the Club who would like to be considered for the nomination may advise the committee of his or her interest.
The nominating committee for President will advise the Club of its nominee for President at the last regular meeting of the Club in October.
Any additional nominations from members of the Club may be made to the Secretary of the Club. Nominations shall close at 12:00 noon on the day of the second regular meeting of the Club in November.
A special meeting will be held Tuesday, October 8, 2019 at the Palliser Hotel. At this meeting all active members in good standing will be asked to vote on a special resolution to amend the club's bylaws.
The special resolution will be to repeal the existing bylaws and replace them with the proposed bylaws that have been circulated to all members.
As an active member it is extremely important that you attend this meeting. Please make every effort to do so.
The Foundations Committee is hosting two seminars for members who are interested in learning how to create lasting legacies. The objectives of these workshops are to
Provide important information for Rotary members who are planning to create or update a will.
Encourage members to consider a charitable gift in their estate plans, including the three ways by which this can be done.
Inspire attendees by focusing on the reasons for making a legacy gift and all the tax advantages that are currently available.
Encourage Rotarians to consider making a legacy gift.
Both workshops will run from 6:15 to 8:30 pm. Please use the links below to register for one of these workshops.
Catherine Scheers introduced Bret Dunwoodie, an ENMAX market specialist, who described how artificial intelligence really works. He described three modes of machine learning: supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement.
In supervised learning, many known (labelled) quantities are provided to the AI to train it against expected outcomes. Once the AI has been appropriately trained, it can be used to predict outcomes based on variations of its inputs. For example, Enmax trains AI systems by providing actual gas demand data and past temperatures. AI systems can then predict future gas demand based on forecast temperatures.
Supervised learning is used by facial recognition algorithms in which the AI is trained to isolate facial features such as eyes and ears, so that it will be able to identify the features on new faces. Supervised learning can be extended to other applications such as natural language processing and automatic picture captioning.
Unsupervised learning follows a different approach in which the AI is not trained or tuned against known data. Instead, the AI simply creates groupings of similar data. Unsupervised learning is helpful in visualizing different groups and is often a good initial step in analyzing data.
Customer segmentation in marketing campaigns is a commonly encountered example of unsupervised learning.
Reinforcement learning is simply learning through doing and is similar to the way humans learn. The AI is rewarded if it successfully completes a task, while failure is penalized. In this style of machine learning, the AI determines actions to take based on its ability to maximize rewards.
Reinforcement learning is commonly used by stock selection AI systems.
Mr. Dunwoodie described how many leading AI applications combine all three modes of machine learning to produce powerful predictive capabilities.
In response to a question from the floor, our speaker indicated that the leading AI risks we are likely to face in the coming years are ethical and legal. Ethical issues will arise when deciding what information features should be used to train AI systems. Inputting biased information into AI systems will result in their making biased predictions. Legal issues will arise when responsibility must be assigned to situations involving an AI system. As an example of this, our speaker raised the question of where the legal responsibility would lie when an automated motor vehicle is involved in an accident.
Aly Bendali thanked our speaker for a most thought provoking-presentation.
COG Staff - September 10th, 2019
Editor
Craig Henderson
Photography
Ralph Lundberg
Rotary Club of Calgary - Chartered April 1914 as Club #949
Suite 305, 105-12 Avenue SE, Calgary, Alberta, T2G 1A1
