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While COVID-19 circumstances have forced organizations to meet remotely on the Zoom application, it has enabled groups like the Rotary Club of New Canaan to invite speakers from far away.

The clubs Zoom Christmas party included a previous Rotary International Scholar, Yuri Nakashima, from her home in Japan. This past weeks luncheon speaker was New Canaan native John Gnuse, son of Rotarian Jeanne Gnuse, and her late husband, Tom. Gnuse spoke to the club from San Francisco, where he is managing director at Lazard, on the topic of The Machine Learning Revolution.

Happily, the Zoom format enabled his sister, Dr. Karen Gnuse Nead, in Rochester, N.Y., and uncle, William Pflaum, in Menlo Park, Calif., to attend as well.

Gnuses career has focused on mergers and acquisitions of major technology companies, e.g. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple, etc., and as such, he is a great guide to the world of machine learning.

His talk highlighted the progress which advanced computing power, and capacity have made possible.

Machine learning refers to the ability for complex algorithms to improve accuracy, and performance based on continuous experience with additional training data.

With these capabilities, complex, iterative processes using with multiple parameters have yielded sophisticated neural networks that can learn.

This has yielded sophisticated tools, and solutions that were not previously possible, but which we rely on now for so much of daily life such as for web search, speech recognition, (Alexa, Siri), medical research and financial optimization models, etc., to name a few.

In answer to concerns about where advances in artificial intelligence will take us, John referred to the guardrails already in place, and those which continue to be applied as key elements of the machine learning revolution. The field raises significant legal, ethical and morality challenges, which will continue to be evaluated as do concerns regarding bias, and fairness as the results of these networks impact people everywhere.

For more on the club, contact Alex Grantcharov, president, at alex.grantcharov@edwardjones.com, follow the club at http://www.facebook.com/NewCanaanRotary, newcanaanrotary on Instagram or at the clubs website, newcanaanrotary.org

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New Canaan native speaks on Machine Learning Revolution - New Canaan Advertiser