Dear All:
Suresh Haridas and I, Jayant, gave a talk on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics on March 10, 2018, to the World Zarathushti Chamber of Commerce.
Please find my opening remarks along with the pictures below.
Also, appreciation letter from P Kharas is attached.
Introduction to AI and Robotics
Good afternoon, I am pleased to be here this afternoon with my colleagues, Suresh Haridas, and Suresh Kumar, both my former colleagues from Tata Consultancy Services and now fellow members of FORTESS an association of former TCS employees.
I would like to thank my tennis buddy Phili Kharas, and his colleagues on the Board of World Zarathushti Chamber of Commerce (WZCC) Aspi Antia and Siganporia for inviting us to talk to all of you on the Artificial intelligence and Robotics.
I am particularly happy because this is one of the first initiatives of FORTESS to give back to society in terms of knowledge that we acquired over the years during our employment with TCS.
I am also happy to tell you that that we have recently celebrated International Women’s Day on 8th March. In that context, I would like to briefly highlight the important role of women in the computer science field.
The world’s first programmer was Countess Ada Augusta Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron) when she wrote a program for the world’s first computer – “The Analytical Engine” designed and developed by Charles Babbage in 1842. So she was a computer pioneer.
During 1913 before World War I, Harvard U set up the Harvard College Observatory (HCO). The scientists at the HCO had to perform many calculations related to astronomical data. The mathematics was quite complex, and a team of women referred to as computers performed all the calculations with high accuracy and speed. The head of the observatory was one Edward Pickering, and the team of women was jokingly referred to as Pickering’s Harem. Today that would be politically incorrect, and quite rightly lawsuits would follow if such disparaging terms were used. In fact, some of the ladies had advanced degrees in mathematics from leading US colleges and eventually rose to prominence in the scientific community.
Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and the United States Navy Rear Admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first compiler related tools. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was fondly referred to as “Amazing Grace”. She is also given credit for coining the term debugging when she discovered a moth in the circuits of the Mark ii computer. During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. A college at Yale University is named in her honour. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology. On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
African American women also made significant strides when a team of women mathematicians performed many complex ballistics calculations necessary for successful space rocket launches and reentry during the 1950’s for NASA at Langley Research Centre. A well-produced movie “Hidden Figures” made recently tells that story. Those intelligent and brave women had to overcome the obnoxious segregation laws. Thanks to the efforts of Rev Martin Luther King and others, the segregation laws were repealed in 1964 when the Civil rights Act was enacted.
Women scientists were also employed by security agencies in UK and USA to decrypt enemy messages during the World War. Today that task is done by computers.
I am happy to inform that our former company TCS with a consulting strength of over 300,000, employs about 100,000 women in various positions and one of them also serves on the board of TCS.
Now to come back to our topic AI and Robotics, we have a detailed presentation by my colleague Suresh Haridas, also here is Suresh Kumar who is another veteran from TCS and is now Hon Treasurer of FORTESS. I am sure that between them they should be able to answer most of your questions. In fact, Kumar regularly won prizes in GK competitions.
Today all of you experience AI and even Robotics in some form or the other. Everyday examples include the use of your smartphone, which has GPS capabilities to help negotiate traffic in a busy city even if you don’t know the street layouts. Some of you may have used “Alexa” for listening to music. When I switch on my TV my amplifier of another make automatically gets switched “on” thereby connecting my home sound system.
How many of you have received alerts on your computer reminding you that you have a train or plane to catch. How is it that when you are browsing on the net, some ad will magically appear informing you of bargains that you were looking for. How is that possible? How can a spoken word command, be understood by your handheld device?
How can a device attached to my shoulder tell me my sugar profile for the past two weeks?
Is somebody watching over you? How can satellites see the license plate of your car? How do satellites know that there is oil, water, or minerals beneath 1,000 meters of the Earth?
How can a rocket me launched into space and then renter and land on earth perfectly vertical to be reused?
All these are possible because the availability of superfast computers acting alone or in a network, or a cloud. They also have access to greatiad memories and high-speed data storage. Added to that are many complex to simple programs, and databases both structured and unstructured.
We hope that in the next hour or so some of the above can be better understood. And with that, I hand the mike to Suresh Haridas.
The presentation was well attended, and very interactive. The appreciation letter from Mr Kharas is produced below:
P. P. Kharas
Regional Director – India
12 March 2018
Dear Jayant and Suresh,
On behalf of WZCC and my senior colleagues, I wish to express our sincere thanks and gratitude for the interesting and informative presentation made by you both that resulted in generating appreciation from the participants.
You have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
Suresh, it was kind of you to have agreed to forward to us a one page write-up on your presentation to wzccindia@on-lyne.com.
We wish you both a lifetime of good health and happiness.
With kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
Phili Kharas
