121–130 of 181 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what number will it get? 6.4? 23? (Also, 13 and 19 are unused.) Or will it go the way of STS? http://web.mit.edu/facts/academic.html
Still 6. The numbers aren't changing.
This sounds like a direct response to two things (mostly): 1) CMU establishing a 'department' of AI (where MIT had merely an AI track within the CS program), and 2) Kai-Fu Lee's recent book on the rise and inevitable domination by China of all things AI-related -- inviting a new 'space race' between the superpowers. (A 'brain race'?) Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field…
MIT's news article [1] has more concrete information. The NYT article is a bit misleading. It is a College of Computing, not College of AI. Also note that MIT has Schools (School of Engineering, School of Science, etc.), not Colleges; so this will be something different. For example, according to MIT's FAQ [2], EECS Department will likely continue to be part of School of Engineering, even as it becomes part of Colleg…
> The goal of the college, said L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T., is to “educate the bilinguals of the future.” He defines bilinguals as people in fields like biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics who are also skilled in the techniques of modern computing that can be applied to them.
> [...]
> Traditionally, departments hold sway in hiring and tenure decisions at universities. So, for example, a researcher who applied A.I.-based text analysis tools in a field like history might be regarded as too much a computer scientist by the humanities department and not sufficiently technical by the computer science department.
They're not just talking about streamlining "learn these statistical models" but also expanding humanities studies.
The obvious wins from this that I see are:
a) more applications of A.I. in areas that C.S. students are less interested in.
b) more people who are knowledgeable about A.I. outside of C.S.
I wish top-rated institutions stopped pretending "AI" means "the last 6 years in statistical machine learning". But I guess we all have our pet peeves, eh?
Is there any reason not to link to the MIT news itself? https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwar... Why link to the nytimes when you can link to the actual source?
Because a press release has a different aim than a news article.
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MIT was one of the earliest leaders in sharing course material online for free. I wish they would take that $1 billion & invest it in modernizing online education. If you want to be a leader in AI, I argue you should open your doors to as many applicants as possible from all over the world at an affordable price. Discover a better way to improve collaboration & online learning. EdX & Coursera are nice but they seem t…
I think if you want to be a leader in AI research you want to attract and nurture the best graduate students and researchers. I don't really know how much doing good research has to do with good online education. I am sure online education is useful but these issues don't really have much in common.
I am currently a CS grad student, I got started with computer science by watching MIT Open Courseware lectures.
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Still 6. The numbers aren't changing.
Looks like it's the other way around — Course 6 will become part of the Schwartzman College of Computing. Does that make it an organizational peer with the Sloan School of Management?
The EECS department is moving, but nothing I've read has indicated a change in numbers.
Is what a peer with Sloan? The College of Computing? Here are the current schools and departments: http://www.mit.edu/education/#schools-and-departments. Considering the EECS department is moving, it seems to me that, yes, the College of Computing is an organizational peer of Sloan. The term "college" is strange, given that everything else is a "school".
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MIT and Harvard are co-founders of edX. What about edX is half-hearted? * I'm an MIT alum and former edX engineer.
My experience has been watch recorded videos, participate in forums & do assignments. The collaborating part needs to improve in my opinion.
A lot of courses are run asynchronously which blows a lot of meaningful collaboration out of the water right there. And even when they're run like a real-time course (which a lot of people who have other schedules/travel/etc. tend to hate), you have such a wide range of skill/language/etc. levels that it's hard to have sensible discussions.
Courses that try to be explicitly discussion-focused are even worse.
Autograding for coding assignments is nice when it works. But I'm honestly not sure the average MOOC is really any better than just reading a book and doing some related exercises.
https://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html
This boondoggle will have everyone from department heads and tenured professors to Boston building contractors climbing over each other to get to the feeding trough. In the end the billion will be soaked up like a sponge, everyone will be looking around saying "What happened?", and little will show as a result of the expenditure.
Better to have selectively (and quietly) researched and invested in more specific efforts. But yeah, it's hard to find an easy way to spend a billion dollars.