HomeMy WebLinkAbout2023-10-05-MMC-min
Monuments & Memorials Committee, Lexington, MA
Minutes of Meeting
October 5, 2023
Parker Room, Town Office Building and By Zoom Teleconference
Members Present
Linda Dixon, Bebe Fallick, Avram Baskin, Leslie Masson (in meeting room)
Glen Bassett, George Gamota, Chuck French (via Zoom)
Guest: Karen Tyler (Director, Veterans Services), James (Yue) Pan (Parent mentor), Judy
Baldasaro (Town GIS administrator), Jerry Xu (LHS Student designer from Heroes team).
Business
The meeting was recorded to the Cloud by Avram Baskin.
The meeting was called to order at 4:05pm. The Chair declared that a quorum was present and
that the meeting was being held in person and by Zoom.
The minutes of the 9/7/23 meeting were approved by roll call vote.
Building the Database
Linda reported that Judy Baldasaro, Town GIS administrator, gave a demonstration of the
existing database at a training meeting on September 7. A second meeting for Friday, October
20, to brainstorm database ideas with Town IT is scheduled. We have 2 champions in our
webmaster (Bethany Ramirez, Lexington Town IT) and Judy to help us any way they can. Four
monuments were written up in an article for the Lexington Times to interest people and
encourage them to send in information to the M&M Committee on any monuments they know
about. They include Benjamin Wellington, the first armed POW of the Revolutionary War; Kay
Tiffany, who persuaded the Town to procure the Pine Meadows Golf Course; Civil War Medal
of Honor recipient, Thomas Cosgrove; and Minute Man statue illuminator Albert Bell Tenney.
In discussion on ideas to generate community interest in our database project, Leslie thought that
it would be a big boost to our efforts to display information about Monuments and Memorials in
the windows of the CVS store. The building owner has a longstanding relationship with the
Lexington Historical Society, who uses the windows for revolving displays. We need to
investigate this possibility. Other suggestions were to post information on the neighborhood
Google Groups and on Neighborhood e-mail lists; on the Lexington e-link newsletter; and the
Lexington Observer electronic newsletter.
Judy Baldasaro joined the meeting at 4:25pm via Zoom. Jerry Xu joined the meeting at 4:25 via
Zoom.
Presentation by Jerry Xu, Heroes Team
Jerry Xu presented the MMC ArcGIS database and the work he and his team have done using
ChatGPT. Our database now has close to 200 memorials. ChatGPT, which is content based, has
successfully generated initial information on 63 of the 200 memorials. Human review and
refinement of the information is needed, however, as ChatGPT will not always include accurate
information about a particular monument subject. ChatGPT cannot provide information on
lesser-known monument subjects.
Jerry’s team has written a ChatGPT Chat Completions API for the M&M Committee to start a
query. There is a modest cost for this ChatGPT Chat Completions API. Currently, using GPT-4
can cost approximately $0.03/750 words. GPT-3.5 Turbo can cost less, but is less powerful. The
cost for the initial data on 181 memorials in the MMC ArcGIS database would be approximately
$5.00. After explaining in simple terms how the ChatGPT Chat Completions API works, Jerry
outlined some steps his team is taking to (1) look for phrases that indicate failure of the search of
the monument subject; and (2) generate a special query to ask ChatGPT for a one-word yes or no
answer whether ChatGPT was able to find information on the monument subject. All the
responses ChatGPT generates for the MMC ArcGIS database are saved in a Google Drive folder
his team set up and currently uses for the ChatGPT results on the MMC ArcGIS database.
Jerry asked the M&M Committee members to review the ChatGPT results on the 181 memorials
and determine to what degree the information is accurate and useful, as Jerry does not believe his
team is qualified for this. The Committee discussed the merits of using ChatGPT results to
initiate information for Committee members. Judy Baldasaro emphasized that the ChatGPT-
generated text is not intended to be used as-is, but can be a useful beginning or addition to
writing text. The Committee decided not to make any formal decision about the use of ChatGPT
at this time, but encouraged Jerry and his team to continue their work on the project.
At this point, Linda Dixon announced that the battery on the laptop running the Zoom portion of
the meeting would run out at some undetermined time, at which time this meeting of the M&M
Committee will be ended.
The meeting was adjourned at 5:00pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Glen Bassett, member