Our speaker for April 1st will be, Ted Dunning, from
San Diego to discuss the future of Machine Intelligence.

Dr. Dunning has researched methods for pattern discovery in diverse
systems over the last 20 years first in an academic setting at the
Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University and
later in emerging companies in southern California
including HNC Software (now Fair Isaac Company), MusicMatch Software
and ID Analytics.

Dr. Dunning's work has been concerned with finding common threads in
the analysis of symbolic sequences in language, genetic sequences,
human web-browsing behavior, musical preferences, purchasing
behavior and financial transactions. His early work on log-
likelihood ratio tests for multi-nomial distributions is widely
cited in the computational linguistics literature and he has
authored or contributed to a number of patents. Most recently, he is
an independent consultant focussing on data-mining and e-commerce
optimization.


Synopsis of Machine Intelligence Talk:

It is now possible to build intelligent machines that perform tasks
commonly considered too difficult for any but human intelligence.
These tasks include making aesthetic judgements about music, solving
visual puzzles and playing 20 questions. Not only is it possible to
do this, but it has been done and computers are performing these
tasks every day, sometimes on a massive scale.

There is a catch. It still isn't possible to perform these tasks
using Artificial Intelligence. Instead, success is being achieved
using Reflected Intelligence. AI is very hard but RI can be very
easy. The difference is all about changing the rules.

Ted will show examples of how these systems solve real-world
problems and explain how they work. He will also describe how to
build such intelligent systems. Finally, he will lead a discussion
about what intelligent systems still can't do and what the future
has in store for these systems.


We also have speakers set up for the 1st Friday in May and June.

For May we have Elaine Weidenhammer, PhD of Nanogen,
to speak on Personalized Health.

In June, we are extremely excited to have Science
Fiction author, Vernor Vinge. His topic is yet to be
announced.