Another Monkey: Kai-Fu Lee, thirty-five years later

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Kai-Fu Lee, thirty-five years later

My grandmother used to love the news magazine program 60 Minutes. I found it mostly uninteresting, but sometimes I would watch it with her. Decades later I sometimes watch it on my own and think of her. Sometimes I find some of the segments interesting.

Today I heard a familiar name mentioned in the opening, just before I had a chance to change the channel: Kai-Fu Lee. Kai-Fu Lee, they said, is currently the biggest name in artificial intelligence, and they would be interviewing him at length.

Kai-Fu Lee? My computer science professor from Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences?

In the summer of 1984 I was one of eighty students from across Pennsylvania - one from each Intermediate Unit - selected to participate in the annual program known as Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences, held at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I've written about it before. For five weeks we took intensive courses in Discrete Mathematics, Computer Science, Organic Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Physics. Our computer science class focused on a programming language called LISP, and was taught by a young professor named Kai-Fu Lee.

I really haven't thought about him much in the intervening thirty-five years. My main interest turned out to be in Physics. I double-majored in Physics and Philosophy from 1985 through 1989, and briefly pursued graduate studies in Physics after getting my bachelor's degree. I haven't kept in touch with many of my PGSS classmates, but I do reminisce about my time there every once in a while.

Kai-Fu Lee has been busy those past thirty-five years.