That... is a cool degree name. Still waiting for CMU to launch an Undergraduate Degree in Digital Currency, though.
I can't tell if you are serious or sarcastic
Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
211–220 of 362 posts
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#212I really do not like this move. AI and Machine Learning require graduate-level mathematical and computational skills. I don't think it's productive to pretend that we can train someone to be even remotely useful in these fields in four years of an undergraduate education. It sounds like an attempt to get around the fundamentals of csci to "skip to the interesting bits," which will produce graduates with a cursory kno…
The same might have been said of a "Computer Science" degree when it split out of mathematics departments. I don't know, the jury's out, but there is a case for teaching what is an expanding area of knowledge with different emphasis than what came before. An undergraduate degree obviously will be more cursory than a graduate program but even then it might help produce a crop of better thinkers for graduate programs w…
I did not study computer science, but on my many years of self-studying I've realised that Mathematics, especially Discrete Mathematics and theoretical Computer Science essentially pursue the same objective using very similar tools.
I'm currently reading Turing's famous paper "Can Machines Think?" and the way Turing explains computers, state machines and Laplace's idea of a deterministic universe made me think about the current state of CS. It seems to me that CS faculties change their curricula to teach students more and more about practical programming and less about its history and theoretical foundations. I think that is not right.
Many of my friends are studying CS as their major, but it seems to me that they don't grasp the deeper meaning of the field. For them CS is about programming, about building apps. For me computer science is not about programming and computers, it is about creating an abstract world of computation that is independent from us.
Maybe it would've been a good decision to keep theoretical computer science inside mathematics departments and offer a computer engineering degree for practical applications such as programming.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#213I really do not like this move. AI and Machine Learning require graduate-level mathematical and computational skills. I don't think it's productive to pretend that we can train someone to be even remotely useful in these fields in four years of an undergraduate education. It sounds like an attempt to get around the fundamentals of csci to "skip to the interesting bits," which will produce graduates with a cursory kno…
okay, that is in theory. Here is the syllabus: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curricu... Do you think any part of that is unreasonable or putting the cart before the horse?
They did a good job on this syllabus. Something had to give, and it is math and engineering depth. No 300 or 400 level courses, like networking or OS. Skipping some close to the metal stuff is probably fine, but I am surprised not to see at least some distributed computing or systems engineering skills. I'd be concerned that a grad could work well within an ideal data env but would get blocked by not being able to engineer processing pipelines.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is completely untrue - machine learning is largely undergraduate mathematics - in fact a lot of the linear algebra is commonly taught in high school. Definitely agree it's potentially narrow, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I agree. Many of the statistical concepts can be extended from advanced undergraduate stats too. I can see how the high salaries paid in these jobs would lead to some serious gatekeeping though. My concern is that these courses will likely be taught without any deference to the ethics involved in the work done, and I think that will play an increasingly important role in years to come.
Ha I actually think the complete opposite will be true - Here in New Zealand I got a degree in neuroscience without doing any papers outside of core science, whereas in the US I would probably have to do humanities based courses etc (which I think is a fairly good thing) - and it's not unlikely that these will come to include topics in ethics.
Also ethical review boards for other areas of science are very well established, and it's not unrealistic to imagine that extending towards machine learning as well.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me "AI" means it learns by itself . Including the decision what to learn, and how. Having done quite a bit of statistics courses over the last few years (albeit with a focus on medicine/biology) and some of free the basic machine learning courses, AFAICS that is not the case, what and how something is learned is all decided and done by the human(s) in front of the computer, no? So, I don't see much "intelligence"…
> To me "AI" means it learns by itself Your definition doesn't match the real definition. Technically, a hard coded rule-based decision algorithm is a form of very basic AI. You seem to be confusing ML and AI- ML is a subset of AI that focuses on training a complex model.
No I'm not confused, as I said, I took the courses. I know what is. I'm just saying that I don't see this as "AI" at all and why. I don't really care that someone decided to define what is possible now as "AI" for whatever reason because I don't agree and don't see that as reasonable. It's not like those "definitions" are laws either, ask around, even among professionals, and you get as many different definitions as you want. Therefore I prefer to use a "common sense expectation/interpretation" approach, and "common sense" here to me means coming from above (where we want to go), not from below (what we have thus far achieved).
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#216I really do not like this move. AI and Machine Learning require graduate-level mathematical and computational skills. I don't think it's productive to pretend that we can train someone to be even remotely useful in these fields in four years of an undergraduate education. It sounds like an attempt to get around the fundamentals of csci to "skip to the interesting bits," which will produce graduates with a cursory kno…
This is a lie that I hear a lot from AI/ML experts. To me it reeks of gatekeeping. Yes the foundations of the field and many of the breakthroughs require this knowledge, but one can be a very effective practicioner of AI/ML techniques with a few years of undergraduate level instruction. And given how many industries are kicking the tires of AI/ML, we're going to need hordes of practicioners.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#217I really do not like this move. AI and Machine Learning require graduate-level mathematical and computational skills. I don't think it's productive to pretend that we can train someone to be even remotely useful in these fields in four years of an undergraduate education. It sounds like an attempt to get around the fundamentals of csci to "skip to the interesting bits," which will produce graduates with a cursory kno…
If you can teach a kid frequentist (regular) statistics, then you can certainly teach them things like Bayesian statistics. Add things like decision trees (which you need to build something like a chatbot). In fact, a friend of mine from my freshman year (way back before everyone had computers in college) wrote a chatbot. I had never seen anything like it, and he let it loose on IRC. Was pretty cool back when things…
You are describing those models as they are being applied (and as many introduction present them) not how they can be trained. To understand whether those models converge, how to calculate the solution to even a basic linear regression, you need graduate math: matrix algebra, differential calculus, topology.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#218I think if this is more the fundamentals for AI rather than "this is all you will ever need to know", in other words NOT vocational, then this makes a lot of sense. When I started counting off the prerequisites to know what you are doing in ML, I could see it filling up a few years of coursework. Calculus up to multivariate calculus (gradient descent), a semester or two of statistics (gotta understand precision / recall, expectation, moments, marginalization), some programming (how are you going to implement your solution?), the fundamentals of regression (overfitting, cross-validation, regularization), don't forget linear algebra. Then there's some prerequisites for unsupervised learning like expectation maximization. SVMs? You'll be needing some constrained optimization and some applied math to make/understand a reasonable solver. This seems like the greater part of an undergrad degree.
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Line / surface / volume integrals are certainly a jump from one-variable integrals.
Not a big jump, if you conceptually stick to the 'area under curve' definition. Analytically computing surface/volume integrals, yes, that is a big jump. But I don't understand why students need to memorize N algorithms and M substitution rules for that.
What is the straightforward "area under the curve" definition of a line integral?
Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a big jump, if you conceptually stick to the 'area under curve' definition. Analytically computing surface/volume integrals, yes, that is a big jump. But I don't understand why students need to memorize N algorithms and M substitution rules for that.
What is the straightforward "area under the curve" definition of a line integral?
Wikipedia has a nice animation for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_integral#/media/File:Line...
