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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

#341

Post by 3pt14159 »

vkjv wrote: post #102
3pt14159 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always this way when new fields start. Give it time. AI leans harder on areas of knowledge that traditional CS treats as periphery like philosophy and linguistics. In a couple decades the field could be as separate from CS as EE is.

I agree, but I think this also supports the parent argument. CS and EE are not very different at the undergraduate level.

They were at Waterloo, my alma matter. CS was far more mathematical and EE had a much broader basis in physics. Comp Eng was the middle ground with overlap on both.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#342

Post by aje403 »

srinivasan wrote: post #253
aje403 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curricu... I see an Introduction to Computer Systems course which looks like the only thing that could potentially teach networking, but from looking at the curriculum, it does not. Can you please find the course on this list that teaches networking, even if it isn't in-depth?

15-213 Introduction to Computer Systems is the one. Anyone who passed that class knows what context switching means, and what TCP is. Whether they still remember it many years down the line is a different matter :)

I stand corrected; there is a lecture referencing networking that I missed upon first glance

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#343

Post by intrasight »

exogeny wrote: post #202
drngdds wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, from someone who hasn't had to do it: how is it possible to do productively study for 16 hours a day? Controlled substances? I don't last that long even on occasion, much less regularly.

All joking aside, CMU does very much have a problem with promoting and fetishizing a culture of stress. I only have anecdotal evidence of this, but more so than just about anywhere else, CMU as a university prides itself on a very difficult workload and a lot of the solutions that students come up with are extremely unhealthy.

I have personal experience (EE,CE,AM '88). CMU sucks in terms of student experience - at least then it did. At least the physical plan is far superior now. The place was fugly in the 80s. The teaching was weak. I felt that I was paying for a reputation.

And on top of that, in our freshman year they had us all come to an auditorium to tell us this: "Sorry, we have to fail half of you out because there are too many of you. Look to your left and then to your right. Those two students will be gone." Any EE in that class can testify to the truthfulness of what I say.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#344

Post by bogomipz »

harveynick wrote: post #168
bogomipz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious to hear how different this proposed CMU curriculum is vs what you had in the early 2000's.

Me too. I'm guessing they'll hear the word "perceptron" less than I did. Probably less Matlab and Prolog will be taught as well. I can't remember whether the Semantic Web course was CS or AI, but I suspect that won't come up, either. Fashions have probably changed enough that their probably won't be that much crossover. For me at least, it depends almost as much on who's doing the teaching than it does what's being t…

>"Me too. I'm guessing they'll hear the word "perceptron" less than I did."

Why would that be? The Perceptron is very much a part of Neural Networks no? Wouldn't it be common now?

I understand about Prolog being a big part of AI curriculum from that time but why was the Matlab so heavy?

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#345

Post by scott_s »

mlazos wrote: post #329
scott_s wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe! But I can foresee a future where this is not the case. I can imagine an electrical engineer in 1955 saying the same thing about software.

So I thought about that scenario, I just don't think an EE can reasonably say that circuit design is necessary to understanding assembly programming. Further, by the time CS departments were created, it was definitely obvious that CS was distinct from EE, at this point I definitely don't think it's obvious that AI/ML will ever be distinct fields from computer science.

Consider that in 1955 (the year I chose above), Fortran was still two years in the future. At this point in time, people were still wrapping their heads around the concept of a library of pre-existing routines that new programs could call. Compilers for algebraic languages pre-Fortran was even called "automatic programming" at the time. Also keep in mind that although the mid '50s was when software and computer science was emerging as a distinct discipline, it wasn't until the '60s that independent CS departments emerged and it took even longer for that to be the norm in most universities. Animats and osteele is a sibling thread have interesting anecdotes in this regard. So I think it's quite possible that electrical engineers at the time not seeing a future where people would think about software independent of hardware. (To see some documents from the time, I wrote about some my family had a while back: http://www.scott-a-s.com/grandfather-univac/)

I don't think it's obvious that AI and data science will be distinct fields from CS. I just think it's quite possible, and if it does happen, this is the time people will point to when it started emerging on its own.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#346

Post by physguy1123 »

bertil wrote: post #332
physguy1123 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you mean some sort of differential topology, those are rigorously covered in and respectable math undergraduate.

I believe that’s the point of contention: I’ve you’ve gone through those programs, you are a graduate.

To be honest most of those are covered at a good-enough level in the sophomore and junior years of a math undergrad. You don't need measures, differential geometry, or even epsilon-delta analysis to do ML which pins the calculus requirements pretty much to whatever proper multivariable calc class one takes in their sophomore year

Edit: if my school wasn't so obsessed with teaching CS majors diffeq (probably just as a gpa filter...), they could already fit in the requisite math for a solid ML understanding

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#347

Post by throwawayjava »

gowld wrote: post #272
throwawayjava wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nothing. Why are you asking this here?

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#348

Post by madengr »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #340
madengr wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electromagnetics is all theory, so much so it’s been dropped from most EE curriculums for being to difficult.

I wish my school would have done that, those were terribly intensive and not really stimulating like signals was.

I ate it up, but then I’m an RF/Microwave EE. Grad level EM is even worse.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#349

Post by bertil »

physguy1123 wrote: post #346
bertil wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that’s the point of contention: I’ve you’ve gone through those programs, you are a graduate.

To be honest most of those are covered at a good-enough level in the sophomore and junior years of a math undergrad. You don't need measures, differential geometry, or even epsilon-delta analysis to do ML which pins the calculus requirements pretty much to whatever proper multivariable calc class one takes in their sophomore year Edit: if my school wasn't so obsessed with teaching CS majors diffeq (probably just as a…

I would argue that you need measure and differential geometry to understand Support Vector Machine and the kernel trick properly.

I think my contention is less things like being formally introduced to ‘epsilon-delta analysis’ (not sure what that is) but more that people trying to cut corners by skipping a semester of differential calculus tend to also skip a big part of the explanation around how models really work. They tend to not grasp what is convergence, get very confused in higher dimensions, and assume ‘harmless’ short-hands like: ”you should aways normalise your data, in some cases, you need to, but why actually remember why, just do it”; “as long as it’s not overfitting, the model is fine” -- without really much recourse when things are not acting as expected.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#350

Post by learc83 »

arbie wrote: post #325
learc83 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a very overloaded term. What we currently call "AI" is likely suffering from the same hype bubble that big data did.

And yet, most of today's commercial AI requires "big data".

Yeah big data can be very useful. The reality just doesn't match the hype.
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