Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

cs.cmu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 362 posts

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#121

Post by btown »

dgacmu wrote: post #79
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.

Parent's post for convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17041413

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#122

Post by fixermark »

learc83 wrote: post #114
fixermark wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shifts the core of the curriculum much deeper into the statistical mathematics and away from the "how the bare metal works" and forest-of-languages pieces of the CS undergrad degree. In particular, you can't generally get the CS undergrad degree without cap-stoning your experience with either a networking or operating systems course; this new degree omits both of those from the curriculum (but adds machine learnin…

It's a few classes. There is no reason they couldn't have just changed the requirement to OS, Networking, NLP, or computer vision. And made the ML and modern regression classes prerequisites for the NLP and computer vision classes. A few very minor tweaks to the CS requirements is all it would take. But you wouldn't get the fanfare of launching a new major. The advantage for students is that if they decide to pursue…

(responded to similar thought on a different thread)

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#123

Post by fixermark »

aje403 wrote: post #88
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…

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 l…

Having graduated with the CMU CS undergrad: if I could go back in time and replace about 80% of the language theory classes that were mandated by the curriculum with regression and machine learning modeling classes, hell yes I would.

(And this is coming from someone who TA'd one of those language theory classes ;) ).

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#124

Post by esahione »

exogeny wrote: post #95
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…

I made the mistake my sophomore year at CMU of enrolling in a graduate-level economics class called "Game Theory" because I got my course prefixes incorrect, and assumed it was a CS class about video games. I am now much more versed in Nash equilibria than I ever thought I'd be, but damn, that class took a chainsaw to my GPA.

Ha! Grad school at CMU took a chainsaw to my GPA after 1st year. Studying 16h/day and still didn't have enough time to complete all assignments and understand the material.

Awesome school though, would do it again.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#125

Post by a-dub »

I think you can make this degree out of the standard electives offered in any good CS program, although the courses at CMU are more likely to be great rather than just good.

To me it was just "the cool CS electives that you get to do if you get all the math, stats and signal processing down pat."

Sad news is that the fields that make up these interesting classes are things that people do PhDs in, so unless you get a PhD you're unlikely to get anyone to pay you to do them when you're done and will get stuck making the help button for the Google Cloud for Education Administrators Console anyway...

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#126

Post by [deleted] »

abvdasker wrote: post #101
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…

Depends on the school. At a good school you can generally always find the classes to learn what you want to learn.

[deleted]

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#127

Post by anaccountwow »

murph-almighty wrote: post #33
bertjk wrote: post #24

"AI majors will receive the same solid grounding in computer science and math courses as other computer science students. In addition, they will have additional course work in AI-related subjects such as statistics and probability, computational modeling, machine learning, and symbolic computation."

CMU Alum here (though I was ECE) - this description seems to make sense, all the 200 level courses are also CS reqs. I was also surprised to find out they brought 15-151 (Math Foundations of Computer Science) back.

It's a pretty good class now!

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#128

Post by fixermark »

kendallpark wrote: post #52
bytematic wrote: post #45

I love the ethics requirements. My current uni doesn't have this and I'm so glad I took it at the college I attended as an underclassmen. The different ethical theories apply so well to a lot of work being done in computer science.

My traditional CS curriculum had ethics as the capstone. Do most CS programs not do this?

I do not think they do.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#129

Post by adjkant »

huffer wrote: post #92

so... what will we call a graduate holding such a degree?

A CS degree with an AI concentration closer to that of a masters student than an undergrad. While I think the importance of this degree is small, there are jobs that will prefer that.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#130

Post by mlazos »

scott_s wrote: post #89
jpizza wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that the way computer science emerged from EE is totally distinct to what’s happening right now. CS eventually abstracted away all of the electrical engineering aspects of the discipline and as a result you need no knowledge of digital logic design to study computer science. AI/ML I don’t think will ever be this way; you will always need CS knowledge in order to experiment/run/optimize your algorithms.
Post reply on HN