>include a strong emphasis on ethics and social responsibility
Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
81–90 of 362 posts
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean?
I think he's referencing the beginning of "Computer Science" degrees. Computers were researched by electrical engineers and mathematicians before.
Yes. My undergraduate diploma says "Electrical Engineering - Computer Science". Computer science wasn't a full department yet.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#83If 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…
So in CMU it's quite easy to get into grad classes and you can start doing it as a freshman - there are generally a number of juniors+ in masters/phd classes
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#84Carnegie Mellon was the first university to offer a PhD in Machine Learning (via the Machine Learning Department which, again, I think is relatively unique in its existence). Regardless of how you feel about the hype, they made an early bet on the field and adding an undergraduate degree seems consistent.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#85This 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…
AI has always felt like a buzzword to me, but I have to admit, I really like the approach taken by the AI course that I took and Peter Norvig's textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod... . Mostly, I like the focus on breaking down the problem domain in a logical way, so you can decide on which approach to take. The problem with the other courses I took (Machine Learning, Statistics, Com…
I used Norvigs book in high school this past year for an independent study and it was a great help. Doesn’t require too firm a grasp on advanced mathematics to understand the major concepts presented, so I think it’d be perfect for undergrad.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#86This 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…
I would love the people who down voted to reveal why.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, I've got a friend with a film degree pulling in decent money in Houston as a solo consultant (hiring contractors as needed (like me)), going from oldschool oil EPC to oldschool healthcare data analysis firms pitching "Big Data analysis" and "AI trained data modeling." Mostly it's plugging .CSVs into google's cloud platform tools, but sometimes I get to peek at some homebrew R or python modeling stu…
But this isnt AI. This is automation. I have done automation in python and I never thought it was AI.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magi... AI.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#88If 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…
Honestly, consider the flip side as well. This is just going to inflate the bubble more and create more unqualified candidates. AI degree means they're going to be churning out candidates who don't know what tcp is or what context switch means. Also, the guy with the (graduate or PHD) AI degree from CMU, before this, handing you his resume, may have studied functional analysis and convex optimization in addition to learning about SVMs. The new guy did not, but he'll be have a checklist of when to use an SVM and when not to, and be pretty good at python. So, in a way, it's deflating the intellectual rigor of the field even further, considering CMU's reputation. Of course, they think it's beneficial to their CS program for whatever set of reasonable reasons we can likely guess at.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#89I think I now know how the electrical engineers felt in the '50s and '60s.
Can you extrapolate on this a bit more? I understand the meaning but it seems different no?
Expanding even more upon a reply to a sibling comment: I think it's possible (but not necessarily so) that AI and "data science" are emerging as academic fields and practical disciplines dependent on, but distinct from, computer science. I think this is similar to how computer science emerged as a distinct discipline from both electrical engineering and math.
Electrical engineering and hardware design didn't go away when computer science emerged - quite the contrary. One could be a computer scientist or a practicing software engineer without having a full backward in the underlying technologies (such as electrical and computer engineering, including computer architecture) and theoretical foundations (from the math side, although theoretical computer science clearly covers a lot of this). But for quite a long time, I think that computer science and the field of software were driving the most visible technological change in society and culture.
I wonder if that's no longer the case, and AI and data science are emerging "on top of" computer science. We may eventually have AI and/or data science academic departments that are distinct from the computer science department in a university. While there would certainly be an intersection of topics covered - just as there currently is with computer science and computer architecture and electrical engineering - I can see the needs of training a new AI and/or data science researcher and practitioner requiring a separate curriculum. I could see that happening if AI and/or data science become the dominant driver of technological change for society and culture in the same way generic "software" was during the latter half of the 20th century.
All of this is speculation, of course. But I think it's quite possible, and perhaps likely.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#90This looks good (which shouldn't be surprising coming from CMU). I'm kind of impressed by how similar this was to my undergrad curriculum (focusing on AI/ML and CS theory). Looks like a fun program. Also wow, Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science[1] is a hell of a course. Induction, DFAs, matchings, TMs, complexity, NP, approximation and randomization, Transducers, crypto, and quantum algos. That's a lot of mat…
yeah, it's rather notorious at CMU for being particularly challenging and fast-paced, especially for a freshman course. sometimes called "two-fifty-fun"!