Dear Colleagues,

We at CBI are delighted to announce this free virtual lecture of CBI Tomash Fellow Aaron Mendon-Plasek (ABD, History, Columbia University). We very much hope you will join us for this CBI event on May 5th (1-2 pm Central; 2-3 E; 11-noon P). Registration is required and will close several days prior to the event day (please register now/soon).

Best, Jeff

A CBI Tomash (Virtual) Lecture on the History of Machine Learning

Please join CBI on Wednesday, May 5 at 1 p.m. CST as our 2020 - 2021 Tomash Fellow Aaron Mendon-Plasek, History Department, Columbia University presents his paper "How 1950s ideas about creativity in machine learning continue to inform social and political possibility today."

This virtual event is free and open to the public but registration is required.

Brief Abstract: Accounts of early machine learning often center on late 1950s work well-known to artificial intelligence researchers such as Samuel's checkers-playing program and Rosenblatt's perceptron. However, as Newell observed retrospectively in 1983, by 1955 machine learning researchers had already splintered off from what "became the AI community.” If early machine learning wasn’t artificial intelligence, what was it? This talk provides an answer. (Full abstract is on the event page on the CBI Website.)

Bio

Aaron Mendon-Plasek is a historian of science and U.S. history and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. His work examines how schemes of quantification, including their material, cultural, technical, and institutional instantiations, have been used to imagine, enact, and justify social order.

About the Tomash Fellowship

Each year the Adelle and Erwin Tomash Graduate Fellowship is awarded to a standout ABD graduate student for doctoral dissertation research in the History of Computing, Information, and Culture.