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[MUSIC PLAYING] ["POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE" PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
["POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE" PLAYING]
[SIDE CONVERSATIONS]
SPEAKER 1: Hello, everyone. Can you hear me?
[APPLAUSE]
OK.
[APPLAUSE]
Good morning and welcome to the 2023 Degree Recognition Ceremony for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. We are delighted to have you all here today.
Look around you now. You've made it through what can graciously be described as a challenging several years. But you've made it to this incredible moment. And I am both honored and delighted to be here with you.
My predecessor used to say that this is without question the happiest weekend of the year in Ithaca, and he was right. The graduates have reached the end of a great and successful journey, and we are here to honor them in the presence of family and friends from all over the world.
People have come from almost every corner of the globe to celebrate our new graduates. We thank all of you for traveling so far to be here with us today and join us in this celebration of a milestone.
All the faculty, myself included, share in your excitement. It has been a really fun year. Let me quickly introduce the faculty present here today sitting on the stage with me.
[READING NAMES]
As most people who know me will tell you, I am really not much of an orator. I stress out for weeks before the speech. And whenever I get up here, all I can think about is what a momentous day this is for all of our graduates and parents and how I'm about to ruin it with some kind of bland soup of trite platitudes about how this isn't the end, but it's the beginning, and yada, yada, yada, yada.
I'd really like to give a speech commensurate with the achievement that you are celebrating. This is really a big deal. You join an illustrious tradition of more than 100 years of Cornell ECE graduates. Cornell was the first university in the world to offer the electrical engineering degree. Electrical engineering was born right here at Cornell.
Ezra Cornell made his fortune on electrical engineering and founded this institution to share that knowledge with the world. Today is the 138th commencement of the school. You are now members and inheritors of the longest electrical engineering tradition in the world.
[APPLAUSE]
So to honor this milestone, I'd like to be able to say something both wise and memorable. I tend to fold under the pressure of this. So one day, when I was walking home from work, I started to be concerned about how to deliver this address and whether I could plan a last minute illness of some sort when I ran into the wife of one of my colleagues.
Being the brilliant woman that she is, she recommended that I try using Chat GPT. She was joking, of course. But in my desperation, I decided to give it a try. So here goes. Dear graduates, family members, and esteemed guests. As we gather here today to celebrate the accomplishments of this year's graduates, I want to share with you some words of wisdom for the future.
While you have achieved a significant milestone by completing your studies, the journey ahead is just beginning and it will be filled with both challenges and opportunities. The piece of advice that I want to offer you is to stay curious, keep asking questions, seeking out new experiences, and challenging yourself to learn and grow. The world is a vast in complex place and there is always something new to discover and explore.
Second, I urge you to embrace change. The pace of change in the world is accelerating and the only constant is that things will continue to evolve and transform. Rather than fearing change, embrace it as an opportunity for growth and innovation.
Third, I encourage you to be adaptable. The skills and knowledge you have gained during your studies will serve you well. But they are only the beginning. The ability to adapt to new situations, to think creatively and flexibly, and to work collaboratively with others will be essential to your success in the years ahead.
Fourth, I want to remind you of the importance of perseverance. No matter how talented or skilled you are, there will be setbacks and failures along the way. The key is to keep going. To learn from your mistakes and never give up on your goals and dreams.
Finally, I urge you to stay connected to your values and to the things that matter most to you. In a world that can sometimes seem chaotic and overwhelming, it can be easy to lose sight of what is really important. By staying grounded in your values and your sense of purpose, you'll be better equipped to navigate the challenges and opportunities in the future with clarity, courage, and conviction.
In conclusion, I want to congratulate all the graduates on this momentous achievement and to wish you all the best as you embark on the next chapter of your lives. Remember, the future is yours to shape, and I have no doubt that you will go on to accomplish great things. Thank you and best wishes for the future.
So all of this got me thinking. Why is this speech so terrible? This won't mean much to anyone born after 1980, but it feels like the voice of the teacher in the Peanuts cartoon, [VOICE OF PEANUTS TEACHER] and you don't actually hear anything, because it is completely devoid of intellectual honesty or anything that sounds like it's coming from a place of truth.
It really is the actual mean of graduation speeches lifted from 1,000 authors and contains really no depth because it was written by a series of program shift registers. EC students will know what that means.
Harvard ethicist Louis Guenin in a 2005 paper describes the kernel of intellectual honesty as a virtuous disposition such that when presented with an incentive to deceive, the agent does not deceive. Intellectual honesty delivers candor when it counts. He contrasts this with ingeniousness, which he describes as a complementary virtue.
So I'm not an ethicist. In fact, the lowest grade that I ever got in college was in my freshman philosophy class. But I interpret this as meaning that being smart and creative and good at programming a microcontroller, which all of you are because you made it this far, is only half the battle.
We know that part of intellectual honesty is honesty and the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas, which is why writing a commencement speech by Chat GPT is problematic. These weren't my ideas or thoughts, even if I agree with some of them. I did not generate them and I don't really stand by them.
But intellectual honesty is more than just acknowledging the work of others and not outsourcing your commencement speech to a neural network. It's also about presenting work in an unbiased manner, about making compelling arguments without misleading, not confusing wanting something to be true really, really badly with it actually being true. Intellectual honesty is what makes real knowledge possible.
Scientific progress is almost entirely dependent on intellectual honesty. There's a fascinating and scientifically very significant instance of intellectual honesty in Newton's understanding of gravity. Back in the 1600s, before the iPhone, Descartes and his followers believed that gravity was supposed to be the result of the pushing upon of ordinary matter by the flow of a subtle ether that filled all of space.
Newton originally accepted this. But his investigation soon led him to realize that Descartes's scheme was at odds with astronomical observations. Newton worked out that all of the observed phenomena of the solar system were explainable in terms of a single mathematical law, according to which two masses, M1 and M2 at distance r apart, attract each other with equal and opposite forces. He published his result in the Principia Mathematica in 1687.
Newton had no idea what gravity was, really, or how it acted, but derived a prediction based on what he observed. This was a profound and radical break from the intellectual framework of the day, and also, one of the clearest indications of intellectual honesty.
He openly declared that he did not understand the secret inner workings of gravity, but he was contented with the mathematical account of its observed effects. In many ways, technology has complicated this issue. In the age of the internet and artificial intelligence, when it is so easy to manipulate, plagiarize, and present misleading data, this is even more important. We cannot simply trust what we are told.
This group of students is launching into a world where technologies are fundamentally changing the way that we learn and process information. You will have to be better at critical thinking than your parents' generation ever was. As an elite group of engineers embarking on your careers at this very strange moment, you have an ethical responsibility to stick to the data.
This may be an uphill battle. It's much easier to use technology to fool people than ever before. Science and truth are undeniably under attack. There will be many who have their own agendas and will see sticking to the data as a threat.
Followers of Descartes accused Newton of being an occultist since the laws that he observed seems to be magical. And he wasn't explaining them, but rather, observing them to be true.
Today's scientists and engineers may be called worse. This is because your job is important, critical even. You're becoming gatekeepers of truth and I don't think that you're going to be free to ignore this responsibility by simply doing your work and letting it be someone else's problem. No pressure, though.
On the upside, your Cornell education has prepared you for this. You haven't just learned how to design a circuit or compute a bound or use a Green's function. You have also put this together with an education in writing and ethics and an understanding of how this fits in with the community that you serve.
You have worked in teams and done amazing things together. This list includes some really amazing team projects such as the persistence of vision display, that includes images of Bruce Land and Hunter Adams, an automatic xylophone that can play the Cornell Alma Mater among other songs, a visual FFT display, and a very cute BB8 robot.
So I'm hopeful and confident that this group who has achieved so much will continue to lead us into a bold new future. On this momentous day, let's conclude on a lighter note. Graduates, your work is complete. You have learned to manage your time, how to solve problems, you've kept your sense of humor, hopefully, and maybe even gotten some sleep now and then.
So while I do still want you to stay curious, embrace change, be adaptable, and persevere, now, in particular, you need to make those things your own. We know you were an incredible engineer because you survived and thrived in a really tough program.
Today, you enter the world to be a great human, an intellectually honest person who is also a great engineer. Congratulations to you, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, class of 2023, and best of luck to you all.
[APPLAUSE]
I now present Aaron Wagner to begin the presentation of degrees with the Bachelor of Science degree.
AARON WAGNER: Professor Apsel, the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering
[READING NAMES]
The candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 2: It's my pleasure to introduce the graduates-- or the candidates for graduation-- as a Master of Engineering.
[READING NAMES]
Give me one second. Excuse me.
[READING NAMES]
I now congratulate the 2023 class of Master of Electrical and Computer Engineering. You worked hard. You deserve the degree.
[APPLAUSE]
I'd like now the present Khurram Afridi to deliver the PhD degrees.
KHURRAM AFRIDI: Next, we will have the candidates for the Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
[READING NAMES]
Congratulations to all the Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Let's give them a big hand of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: So thank you all for joining us. That concludes our ceremony today. And congratulations to all the 2023 graduates. We look forward to all of the great things you're going to give us in the next generation.
[APPLAUSE]
[STAR WARS "THE IMPERIAL MARCH" (DARTH VADER'S THEME) PLAYING]
