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M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

nytimes.com

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Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#11

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nhf wrote: post #4
supahfly_remix wrote: post #2

> The college, Ms. Nobles said, offers the possibility of a renewal for humanities studies at M.I.T., where students flock to computer science and engineering. Do MIT students major in humanities subjects, or is the department's purpose to make engineering students well-rounded through taking electives in their department?

Both. Undergrads have certain humanities requirements to fulfill - obviously some are natural fans, others treat it like an "eat your broccoli" requirement. Independent of requirements, MIT also has a fairly good reputation for philosophy, political science, linguistics, media studies, and a few other areas.

Ya, also Noam Chomsky, who has a bit of infamy, is an MIT professor of linguistics.

Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#13

Post by Puer »

corndoge wrote: post #9

College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation

Unfortunately, I think statistics will continue to be under-appreciated. All of my mathematics professors in undergraduate said that statistics and linear algebra are the two most useful fields of math to know and that dedicating time to studying them will pay dividends. It still surprises me when I apply for jobs today how few places, even financial or scientific firms, distinguish between statistics and mathematics in their application forms.

People want to be become machine learning engineers because it's the sexy thing right now, but they don't want to learn the necessary statistics/linear algebra/optimization necessary for the roles. In my experience, these "AI" and "datascience" programs are largely just cash-grabs at most universities. I don't doubt that M.I.T.'s will be rigorous, but I'm largely skeptical of how useful these programs actually are.

Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#14

Post by galago »

supahfly_remix wrote: post #2

> The college, Ms. Nobles said, offers the possibility of a renewal for humanities studies at M.I.T., where students flock to computer science and engineering. Do MIT students major in humanities subjects, or is the department's purpose to make engineering students well-rounded through taking electives in their department?

MIT has also been combining majors like Econ and CS--I'm not sure how these things can be counted.

https://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-creates-new-major-computer-sci...

Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#15

Post by gradys »

corndoge wrote: post #9

College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation

That's much of the math behind AI, but there's much more to building real things with it. It's a cross-disciplinary field touching:

- Math, as you say

- Software engineering, especially data engineering

- Design - since the the math and engineering enable new kinds of problems to be solved by computers, there's a lot of unexplored design territory

- The domains of all the input and output modalities it touches, like linguistics, computer vision, etc.

- Increasingly, ethics

Sure, each of these topics are already covered by existing university departments, but the boundaries between departments are arbitrary and often limiting anyway. Why not establish a new locus that brings much of the above under one physical and administrative roof?

Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#16

Post by chodeboy »

Not too sure what is the point. Colleges already have a hard time to fill their engineering places with domestic students. When I studied last year at Stanford 50%-60% of the students were from China and India and most of them went back afterwards. I feel like the US might be spreading its human resources too thin trying to dance on every party and solving the problem by throwing lots of money at it.

Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#18

Post by sjg007 »

Puer wrote: post #13
corndoge wrote: post #9

College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation

Unfortunately, I think statistics will continue to be under-appreciated. All of my mathematics professors in undergraduate said that statistics and linear algebra are the two most useful fields of math to know and that dedicating time to studying them will pay dividends. It still surprises me when I apply for jobs today how few places, even financial or scientific firms, distinguish between statistics and mathematics…

Pretty sure MIT offers stats and linear algebra.

Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#19

Post by gajjanag »

gradys wrote: post #15
corndoge wrote: post #9

College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation

That's much of the math behind AI, but there's much more to building real things with it. It's a cross-disciplinary field touching: - Math, as you say - Software engineering, especially data engineering - Design - since the the math and engineering enable new kinds of problems to be solved by computers, there's a lot of unexplored design territory - The domains of all the input and output modalities it touches, like…

The funny thing is that MIT already has something called "MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society" (IDSS): https://idss.mit.edu/

I wonder how this is going to play with the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and what each entity will choose to focus on.

Re: M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

#20

Post by dubya123 »

Puer wrote: post #13
corndoge wrote: post #9

College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation

Unfortunately, I think statistics will continue to be under-appreciated. All of my mathematics professors in undergraduate said that statistics and linear algebra are the two most useful fields of math to know and that dedicating time to studying them will pay dividends. It still surprises me when I apply for jobs today how few places, even financial or scientific firms, distinguish between statistics and mathematics…

I don't know what job postings you are seeing but the vast majority of Data Scientist/ML Engineer postings at large tech companies that I've seen explicitly mention Statistics as a requisite skill.
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