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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

#271

Post by joshuamorton »

mepian wrote: post #257
joshuamorton wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, theorem proving is an important area of computer science with many connections to AI. I think this is only true if you use a different definition of AI than the one likely used here. Expert systems aren't considered to be very effective tools for useful "AI" anymore. You can't define a procedure to recognize a happy face in logic programming, at least not with any degree of efficiency.

Is recognizing happy faces the only use for AI? Who redefined AI to solely mean Machine Learning and excluded everything else that defined it before the AI winter?

No, but if you want to solve certain useful problems, ml works and expert systems don't. That's what I was getting at.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#272

Post by gowld »

throwawayjava wrote: post #238
graycat wrote: post #180

IMHO, a "modest proposal" for the the CMU CS AI degree, CMU CS, and much of STEM field academics: Have much of the department and program borrow from clinical medicine . So, have the department be in part a clinic for solving problems from outside academics via STEM material, information technology, CS, AI, etc. E.g., yes, continue to have seminars with graduate students and professors with, call it, solutions lookin…

Whenever it makes sense to ground research in practice, CMU professors generally do so by working with industry and govt collaborators. Many CMU CS professors also do some paid consulting on the side. However, top tier PhD programs are not and never will be highly discounted consulting shops. At places like CMU grad students have perhaps more academic freedom than even their advisors. And good thing. The day CMUs of…

What is evil about non-basic research?

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#273

Post by matthewbauer »

asdsa5325 wrote: post #207
jknoepfler wrote: post #164

I 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…

Absolutely false, I can't believe this comment is up voted. Undergrad Linear Algebra & Statistics is definitely enough for ML. In fact, they taught introductory ML at my old high school in AP CS, years ago.

Maybe for an intro course, but a degree usually means you are ready to work in that field. I’m not sure what ‘field’ that is but I assume they are looking at it for AI research.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#274

Post by israrkhan »

jknoepfler wrote: post #164

I 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…

While you are right, that deep understanding of machine learning require graduate level mathematics, however I see the trend where big companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft) are trying to democratize AI and machine learning. Soon you will have people using machine learning tools and algorithms without understanding the underlying math.

Given the nature of machine learning, even if you understand the mathematics behind it, you cannot "reason" with a trained-model. I think now academia is catching up in this democratization effort, by producing engineers that can use those machine learning tools (even if they cannot design such tools/frameworks)

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#275

Post by matthewbauer »

sjg007 wrote: post #232
jknoepfler wrote: post #164

I 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…

I majored in AI before the current fad. It’s basically a concentration and depends on the University. It goes a little deeper on the AI side using electives.

Really? Was it an accredited program? Most of what I’ve seen before is that you get a CS degree but with a ‘focus in’ AI.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#276

Post by swiley »

MR4D wrote: post #237
bertil wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me, your statement is like saying an airline mechanic needs to have a pilot's license because he needs to know how the rudder affects the flight. There are three different roles that I think you are conflating: Designing, Building (and maintaining), and using. Each has a different skillset. But to think that you need to determine the convergence of models makes no sense to me. Why can't an undergrad build a simple…

I don’t see how building a web page is any different now than it was in 1998, if anything it seems like everyone has made it harder to build correct pages.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#277

Post by senatorobama »

smrtinsert wrote: post #65
scott_s wrote: post #8

I think I now know how the electrical engineers felt in the '50s and '60s.

So that's what that feeling in my gut is. I'm struggling to find the time to learn ML/AI. This is another red flag to me that I should have been on this long ago.

I think it's time to say, as Arnold does, to break the rules and do this at work.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#278

Post by learc83 »

asdsa5325 wrote: post #209
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…

Did you not bother looking at the curriculum before making a comment about the curriculum? https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curricu...

I looked over the curriculum pretty thoroughly. Look through some of the other comments in this thread to see a more detailed look at the differences.

If you look over the curriculum and compare it the BS CS curriculum you'll notice there's nothing that couldn't have been done as a concentration.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#279

Post by dgacmu »

learc83 wrote: post #250
dgacmu wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logic and languages cluster, while not exclusively a functional programming set, practically covers a lot of what one might think of as upper-division FP concepts. Foundations of PL and Semantics are bread and butter PL theory, for example.

But none of those are required in that section. You could take Software Foundations of Security and Privacy, or Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems.

Funny you'd pick those two. :-)

Software Foundations includes, for example, the use of type systems to ensure bug-freedom, program semantics, and more. Matt Fredrikson focuses on the intersection of formal programming languages research and security. For example, lecture 3: https://15316-cmu.github.io/lectures/03-safety.pdf

Cyber-physical is one of the hardest classes I've ever seen. Seriously - it combines very solid differential mathematics with logic and formal verification. It's a different set of skills than Semantics, but it combines a really solid dose of the same kind of logical and proof-centric thinking that advanced PL courses do. And rapidly runs into the logical underpinnings of both fields. For example, lecture 13: http://symbolaris.com/course/fcps16/13-diffchart.pdf

(In large part, this is because the course relies on identifying PL-style semantics of differential systems, and thus, students in the course end up being exposed to nearly identical proof methods as they do in the more straight-up PL semantics course, in addition to a lot of differential equations.)

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#280

Post by GCU-Empiricist »

badminton1 wrote: post #188
jknoepfler wrote: post #164

I 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…

You could also say computer science is just discrete mathematics, and therefore people doing CS should rather study math. But we both know in practice they're substantially different lines of work.

As my algorithms professor said on his programming project. A program is just a number, pick the right number.

At least he made it funny.

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