On Friday, October 25, Ken Pruitt, Sustainability Director for the Town of Winchester, will discuss Winchester’s Climate Action Plan, his role implementing it, and progress and challenges in implementation. The CAP includes 69 measures in the areas of energy, buildings, transportation, solid waste and climate resilience. Ken will also discuss ongoing projects and initiatives such as the Lynch Elementary School, which will be Winchester’s first net zero energy building; two new high-speed electric vehicle charging stations located in the Jenks-Town Hall parking lot, a proposed stricter building energy code up for adoption at Fall Town Meeting, and other topics.
Ken Pruitt became Winchester's first Sustainability Director in 2021. Prior to joining Winchester, he spent four years as Energy Manager for the Town of Arlington, located in the Department of Planning and Community Development. As Arlington's Energy Manager, Ken was the Town’s lead on energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, electric vehicle acquisition and charging infrastructure, the Arlington Community Electricity program, building electrification, municipal energy supply, and net zero planning. Prior to working for the Town of Arlington, Ken served as Director of Conservation for the Town of Boxford and went on to become Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions and then the Environmental League of Massachusetts. He earned a Master of Forest Science degree from the Yale School of the Environment and a BA in Political Science and International Studies from Macalester College. Ken has been a Winchester resident since 2010 and, since 2014, an elected member of Town Meeting.
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Monday, October 21, 2024
On October 11th join our Generative AI Panel Discussion with Ron Smith, Bernhard Suhm, and Marv Goldschmitt.
On October 11th the speakers who met with in September have been invited back for an open conversation with us. I hope that you will come prepared to discuss your thoughts on the advances in AI as well as the challenges that confront people all over the planet.
In my experience, technologists have been historically reluctant to become involved in public policy and yet in our technologically intense world the absence of technological input is a concern to me. I saw a recent article in the New York Times by writer James Pogue about Senator Chris Murphy. Pogue wrote “... the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel.” Senator Murphy (D-Conn) and Governor Spencer Cox (R-Utah) have launched a national conversation with the intent to restore the common good. They look to involving intellectuals and activists. Notably, technologists do not seem to be included in their thinking. Maybe they were not considered/invited. In any case, we need to become part of the conversation.
There is a lot of good that has come from technology in health care, for example, and more to come. But I am equally certain that technology can be and is being used abusively. The misinformation and disinformation that appear in social media are examples. The changes in AI that began in November 2022 with Generative AI are remarkable. GenAI is not any new technology. This one is shattering. But I suppose that to the average thoughtful person, the telephone must have been shattering. Just as the Model T. What is different is the case of GenAI is that it does not just add a new dimension to our lives, it presents technology as a force beyond nature. It allegedly thinks and feels though it is not clear on what scale and in what detail it compares to human thinking. But we don’t really understand the particulars of how humans think. I worry that technology may be heading so far out front of humans that people may begin to distrust science and technology on a level that is unprecedented today. That would be disaster from my perspective.
Technology and technologists have crucial roles to play in my view in medicine, meeting energy demand, addressing climate change, k-12 education (which has been on my radar screen for decades) and so much more. My hope is that we have learned some lessons from the history of the Internet and The Web that may help lead to a responsible and accountable advance of AI into our social fabric. My sense, however, is that GenAI has the potential to be supremely useful and also supremely abusive (personal, socially, culturally) and the tech giants who are moving it at breakneck speed are driven by age old motivation...fear (of losing market share) and greed (fear of losing market share) rather than societal benefit.
In my experience, technologists have been historically reluctant to become involved in public policy and yet in our technologically intense world the absence of technological input is a concern to me. I saw a recent article in the New York Times by writer James Pogue about Senator Chris Murphy. Pogue wrote “... the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel.” Senator Murphy (D-Conn) and Governor Spencer Cox (R-Utah) have launched a national conversation with the intent to restore the common good. They look to involving intellectuals and activists. Notably, technologists do not seem to be included in their thinking. Maybe they were not considered/invited. In any case, we need to become part of the conversation.
There is a lot of good that has come from technology in health care, for example, and more to come. But I am equally certain that technology can be and is being used abusively. The misinformation and disinformation that appear in social media are examples. The changes in AI that began in November 2022 with Generative AI are remarkable. GenAI is not any new technology. This one is shattering. But I suppose that to the average thoughtful person, the telephone must have been shattering. Just as the Model T. What is different is the case of GenAI is that it does not just add a new dimension to our lives, it presents technology as a force beyond nature. It allegedly thinks and feels though it is not clear on what scale and in what detail it compares to human thinking. But we don’t really understand the particulars of how humans think. I worry that technology may be heading so far out front of humans that people may begin to distrust science and technology on a level that is unprecedented today. That would be disaster from my perspective.
Technology and technologists have crucial roles to play in my view in medicine, meeting energy demand, addressing climate change, k-12 education (which has been on my radar screen for decades) and so much more. My hope is that we have learned some lessons from the history of the Internet and The Web that may help lead to a responsible and accountable advance of AI into our social fabric. My sense, however, is that GenAI has the potential to be supremely useful and also supremely abusive (personal, socially, culturally) and the tech giants who are moving it at breakneck speed are driven by age old motivation...fear (of losing market share) and greed (fear of losing market share) rather than societal benefit.
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
On September 27th, Bernhard Suhm will continue our conversation about Generative AI.
He will speak with us on Transforming Search Experiences with Semantic Search. The landscape of information retrieval has undergone a paradigm shift with the advent of semantic search technologies. Traditional keyword-based search methods often yielded inconsistent results, requiring users to navigate through extensive lists or documents to locate pertinent information, and familiarity with the jargon when searching specialized domains. This talk examines the transformative impact of semantic search and explores its subsequent developments. Semantic search, by leveraging natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, has significantly enhanced the relevance and accuracy of information retrieval. This technology is able to capture user intent, context, and the conceptual relationships between search terms and content. As a result, semantic search has markedly reduced the cognitive load on users, by delivering more relevant answers. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT brought AI and semantic retrieval on everyone’s minds. Haven’t we all tinkered with them, and are amazed what they can do? Not only can they answer complex questions in a dialog, they give advice on how to proceed, they diagnose issues and help you troubleshoot, they even deliver code and build whole systems.
Bernhard Suhm Ph.D., Principal, USpeak AI, has been applying AI to improving user experiences and solving business challenges his whole career. Prior to working as an independent consultant, he drove adoption of machine learning, vector search, and generative AI as a product marketer at Elastic, promoting how these capabilities enable more automation in observability, additional layers of security, and improved search experiences. In prior roles, Bernhard was product owner of the Machine Learning toolbox at MathWorks, and developed AI-powered call analytics to improve caller experiences and the delivery of customer service, influencing the handling of 100Ms calls working with Fortune 100 companies. He received a PhD in Computer Science specializing in speech user interfaces from Karlsruhe University in Germany, learned the ropes of user-centered design at Carnegie Mellon University, and has presented on speech recognition, caller experience analysis, and machine learning.
Bernhard Suhm Ph.D., Principal, USpeak AI, has been applying AI to improving user experiences and solving business challenges his whole career. Prior to working as an independent consultant, he drove adoption of machine learning, vector search, and generative AI as a product marketer at Elastic, promoting how these capabilities enable more automation in observability, additional layers of security, and improved search experiences. In prior roles, Bernhard was product owner of the Machine Learning toolbox at MathWorks, and developed AI-powered call analytics to improve caller experiences and the delivery of customer service, influencing the handling of 100Ms calls working with Fortune 100 companies. He received a PhD in Computer Science specializing in speech user interfaces from Karlsruhe University in Germany, learned the ropes of user-centered design at Carnegie Mellon University, and has presented on speech recognition, caller experience analysis, and machine learning.
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