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Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

cs.cmu.edu

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Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#71

Post by danohu »

jcranmer wrote: post #36

Looking at the course list ( https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curricu... ), I'd struggle to believe that students are going to come out of this strong enough to be effective in AI. I never went to CMU, so I don't know how rigorous the "Modern Regression" course is for actually getting people sufficiently well-grounded in statistics to be able to overcome p-hacking and similar fallacies in analysis…

Here are the lecture notes for Modern Regression (bottom of page): http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/mreg/15/

Looks pretty serious to me

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#73

Post by ethbro »

bytematic wrote: post #48
majormajor wrote: post #21

This feels like a more useful CS degree, IMO. I don't do anything like machine learning, but for both scaling backend services and building day-to-day business logic, I've gotten a ton of value out of knowing stats, logistics, and a certain amount of pattern recognition (ah, how terms go in and out of fashion). Take this stuff instead of the other sorts of electives I was picking from - UML Modeling, for instance - a…

You had a whole class dedicated to UML Modeling? That makes me laugh, I know it gets very complicated in high level java applications, but man that feels like a waste of time.

Same. I hope I was the last generation of "OO waterfall design is the pinnacle of software engineering" thought.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#74

Post by ethbro »

electricslpnsld wrote: post #67
learc83 wrote: post #49

This seems like a publicity stunt. It sounds like a CS degree where the electives are predetermined. Why couldn't they just make this a concentration when it's so intimately intertwined with CS. The extra overhead graduates will have to deal with doesn't seem worth it. "AI majors will receive the same solid grounding in computer science and math courses as other computer science students. In addition, they will have…

> It sounds like a CS degree where the electives are predetermined This is offered through CMU's school of computer science (SCS), so that is exactly what this is. CMU loves creating new sub-departments with SCS, for some reason, there are already 7 or 8.

New faculty titles!

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#75

Post by majc2 »

iamcasen wrote: post #26
harveynick wrote: post #13

My undergraduate degree (from The University of Edinburgh) is Artificial Intelligence. I remember when I was visiting different universities in the UK back in 2000, Edinburgh was the only one I saw which offered AI as a "real" degree. Everywhere else it was a specialization which was tacked on in the final year of a computer science degree. That seemed really odd to me then. Seems even odder now.

I'm curious to hear about your experience. In my mind, artificial intelligence can't be separated from computer science. In fact, I feel like you need a full Comp Sci degree before you can effectively apply your skills to real world AI challenges.

Back in the 2000s - it was AI & CS (or SE) Joint Honours.

In 1st and 2nd year, you would do the same Maths and CS course as CS/SE; you didn't get an elective it was a separate AI course, which covered the basics.

In 3rd/4th year (honours years as they're called here) - IIRC you'd have to take 8 courses in 3rd (plus an individual project and a team project) and 6 in 4th and your dissertation. Depending on the degree specialisation; you had to take some mandatory courses (CS only had to do Compiling Techniques and Algorithms, AI/CS didn't have to do CT - but they had to do Algorithms and Computability and Intractability). So, the two departments were very closely aligned and then were brought together into a new department/school within the Science and Engineering faculty.

They also offer a single AI honours degree now, but the structure seems very similar to what I experienced, with perhaps a bit more freedom in 3rd and 4th year.

Interestingly, while the majority of students were AI/CS or AI/SE - they also had joint honour programmes outside the faculty - so there were a few students who were AI and Psychology as well as AI and Linguistics. I don't believe they offer this combination anymore.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#76

Post by aroman »

minimaxir wrote: post #35
jimbokun wrote: post #30

A long long time ago, I got a Bachelors degree in Logic and Computation, with a specialization in Computational Linguistics from the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon. Seemed to be the closest thing to an "AI" degree on offer at the time, from my undergrad perspective.

As of recently, CMU had a Human-Computer Interaction track, which I know a lot of HSS students took.

There's an entire second major (and minor) in HCI, now :-)

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#77

Post by rpearl »

jcranmer wrote: post #36

Looking at the course list ( https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curricu... ), I'd struggle to believe that students are going to come out of this strong enough to be effective in AI. I never went to CMU, so I don't know how rigorous the "Modern Regression" course is for actually getting people sufficiently well-grounded in statistics to be able to overcome p-hacking and similar fallacies in analysis…

I am admittedly somewhat biased, since I have a Bachelor's in CS from CMU, but I'm not really seeing anything problematic here. (Not to mention, many CMU students will take on minors as well, though I'm totally blanking on whether a minor is required.)

Modern Regression is a 400-level statistics course at a school that values statistics and AI.

Many of the higher-level electives will involve sophisticated projects--not 2 semester capstones to be sure, but month-or-longer open ended projects.

Not really sure what you're expecting out of undergrad programs, to be honest.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#78

Post by QML »

kendallpark wrote: post #70

If you are an undergraduate in computer science these days, it is very hard to get into advanced AI/ML classes, which are typically reserved for graduate students. Back before the ML goldrush, a strong CS undergrad interested in AI could elect to take advanced coursework beyond the introductory AI class. Nowadays, good luck getting off the waitlist! Having an official "AI major" does at least tell students, "Hey, we…

While there may be a lot of demand for AI/ML, I’m concerned to whether there are enough students with the proper foundations in math and stats to do well. New classes such as Data Science seem to just instruct students how to use algorithms and not why.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#79

Post by dgacmu »

learc83 wrote: post #49

This seems like a publicity stunt. It sounds like a CS degree where the electives are predetermined. Why couldn't they just make this a concentration when it's so intimately intertwined with CS. The extra overhead graduates will have to deal with doesn't seem worth it. "AI majors will receive the same solid grounding in computer science and math courses as other computer science students. In addition, they will have…

It's not just predetermined electives - it removes several of the CS upper-division breadth requirements to allow more depth in AI/ML/stats. (I posted a comparison below, so won't repeat it here.) It's a pretty decent change to serve the students who really want to push more on ML.

The key thing to look at is what the CS major requires that the AI major doesn't -- in 8 semesters, you can only fit in so many classes.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#80

Post by epicureanideal »

learc83 wrote: post #49

This seems like a publicity stunt. It sounds like a CS degree where the electives are predetermined. Why couldn't they just make this a concentration when it's so intimately intertwined with CS. The extra overhead graduates will have to deal with doesn't seem worth it. "AI majors will receive the same solid grounding in computer science and math courses as other computer science students. In addition, they will have…

Well, that's basically what Computer Science degrees started out as, right? An Electrical Engineering degree with a bunch of software related electives? Even now, at UC Berkeley for example, "EE/CS" majors can choose a set of courses that end up almost exactly matching what the "CS" majors take, with not necessarily more EE. It's really just a narrowing of the electives.

There are enough AI related courses available now at many schools that it seems useful to separate "more general Computer Science" from "a focus on Artificial Intelligence", and similarly I think there's room for a separate major in "Software Engineering" as opposed to theoretical computer science.

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