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

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

#141

Post by mattferderer »

ghaff wrote: post #129
mattferderer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been watch recorded videos, participate in forums & do assignments. The collaborating part needs to improve in my opinion.

The collaboration component of MOOCs ranges from mediocre to god-awful. And it's hard to see how it could be otherwise at scale. 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.…

I agree with everything you said.

I do think you need to have deadlines. They can be more flexible but deadlines help at least keep groups of the class at the same pace. The more people participating, the more relaxed the deadlines can be. I've seen some courses that have so many people, you could honestly take the class at your own time & always have people to discuss the current lecture with.

In the case of a real MIT online degree, I would support a schedule that mimics the campus schedule. If you have other schedules/travel/etc., then sign up only for 1 course at a time & understand what you're committing to.

I get scaling is hard the more "real" you make the course. I feel you can have a nice balance between hiring assistants to help with grading & discussions by increasing the cost somewhere in between on-campus & average MOOC prices.

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

#143

Post by ghaff »

mattferderer wrote: post #141
ghaff wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collaboration component of MOOCs ranges from mediocre to god-awful. And it's hard to see how it could be otherwise at scale. 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.…

I agree with everything you said. I do think you need to have deadlines. They can be more flexible but deadlines help at least keep groups of the class at the same pace. The more people participating, the more relaxed the deadlines can be. I've seen some courses that have so many people, you could honestly take the class at your own time & always have people to discuss the current lecture with. In the case of a real…

>I feel you can have a nice balance between hiring assistants to help with grading & discussions by increasing the cost somewhere in between on-campus & average MOOC prices.

Blended models have a lot of promise--at least in theory. My understanding is that post-pivot Udacity does some things along these lines. And, of course, there are more traditional degree programs that have a large online component.

One of the nice things about CS/programming is that, in many cases, you don't really need the physical resources of a university campus. And even if you can't handle 100% of a full degree program, "nanodegrees" and the like are a big win. It's also nice that computer systems can handle a lot of the grading of problem sets--and, as you say, it's not super-expensive to have TAs handle the rest. (Source: I remember what I was paid to be a grader for a few courses in grad school :-))

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

#144

Post by smrtinsert »

randcraw wrote: post #46

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…

As a newbie to AI and ML, what puzzles me most is that what is really to ultimately it to work is a very well optimized and trained model - but once you have that model, who do you need?

Am I wrong in this understanding?

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

#145

Post by thanatropism »

ocschwar wrote: post #90
Puer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup. Statistics does continue to be under-appreciated, nowhere more than among dudebros who read up about ML for no reason except that's where the money seems to be. MIT alum here. I expect this new department to be a gross embarassment compared to the rest of campus initially. Then they'll enforce standards to bring it into line, which will suppress enrollment, and then the department will be merged into the CS depa…

> Won't be the first time.

Story time?

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

#146

Post by throwsaway9192 »

clintonb wrote: post #110
mattferderer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

MIT and Harvard are co-founders of edX. What about edX is half-hearted? * I'm an MIT alum and former edX engineer.

Hi Clinton,

Author of edX here. At the time I left edX, the vast majority of courses used long videos and multiple choice questions.

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

#147

Post by soared »

codekilla wrote: post #134
ryanmarsh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish top-rated institutions stoped pretending "Physics" means "the last 6 years in Electricity/Chemistry/etc..." - Someone circa 18-hundred-something shrugs The two things people dislike the most, the way things are, and when they change.

The success of statistical machine learning is more limited than may be obvious. Try to think of problems these methods can't solve, then try to think of problems they can solve. Which stack is thicker? Then ask yourself, for the problems they can solve--can they really solve them as well as humans? Machine Translation, I'm looking at you, Image Recongition--I'm also looking at you. If they can solve them as well as…

There are plenty of solutions to get around those problems though. Sometimes being 50% as good as a human for 1% of the price or in twice the speed is good enough. Or if it can be correct 50% of the time, but can tell when its wrong, it can be correct 100% of the time with twice the work. If the work is still cheaper/faster than humans...

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

#148

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #98
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #79

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?

I wish top-rated institutions stoped pretending "Physics" means "the last 6 years in Electricity/Chemistry/etc..." - Someone circa 18-hundred-something shrugs The two things people dislike the most, the way things are, and when they change.

>> The two things people dislike the most, the way things are, and when they change.

Look here, there is no excuse for a reseacher to be ignorant of the history of his or her field. A researcher, after all, is expected to be a world-class expert in his or her chosen subject. Joining a field with a history of ~70 years and remaining clueless about 9/10s of it, is not being an expert in anything.

But to address your comment directly, and frankly- what I'm mostly afraid of is repeating the mistakes of the past, and being lost in a sea of cookie-cutter papers that repeat the mistakes of the past.

And that's modern machine learning research in a nutshell.

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

#149

Post by clintonb »

throwsaway9192 wrote: post #146
clintonb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT and Harvard are co-founders of edX. What about edX is half-hearted? * I'm an MIT alum and former edX engineer.

Hi Clinton, Author of edX here. At the time I left edX, the vast majority of courses used long videos and multiple choice questions.

Yes. Rather than assume, I still pose the question: what is half-hearted about that? What can be changed for the better?

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

#150

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

soared wrote: post #147
codekilla wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The success of statistical machine learning is more limited than may be obvious. Try to think of problems these methods can't solve, then try to think of problems they can solve. Which stack is thicker? Then ask yourself, for the problems they can solve--can they really solve them as well as humans? Machine Translation, I'm looking at you, Image Recongition--I'm also looking at you. If they can solve them as well as…

There are plenty of solutions to get around those problems though. Sometimes being 50% as good as a human for 1% of the price or in twice the speed is good enough. Or if it can be correct 50% of the time, but can tell when its wrong, it can be correct 100% of the time with twice the work. If the work is still cheaper/faster than humans...

>> Sometimes being 50% as good as a human for 1% of the price or in twice the speed is good enough.

Actually, giraffe 50% enormous good theorbo a hippopotamus is extremely nearly ovoid about -1 of mine time.

That's 50% of the sentence:

Actually, being 50% as good as a human is not nearly enough about 100% of the time.

And 50% garbage.

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