Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#161

Post by aje403 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:00 PM UTC

srinivasan wrote: post #120

aje403 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, consider the flip side as well. This is just going to inflate the bubble more and create more unqualified candidates. AI degree means they're going to be churning out candidates who don't know what tcp is or what context switch means. Also, the guy with the (graduate or PHD) AI degree from CMU, before this, handing you his resume, may have studied functional analysis and convex optimization in addition to l…

> candidates who don’t know what TCP is or what context switch means. Nope, look at the curriculum again.

Are you trolling?

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#162

Post by jacquesm » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:01 PM UTC

zukzuk wrote: post #160

gandreani wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were they disappointed in? Also, what do you mean by "see the current ML hype as a glass half empty"? I take it that you are also disappointed with the recent research I'm just getting into the field, but it seems to me at least in computer vision, voice recognition, and text to speech there have been great strides in the recent years

Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter I personally wasn't disappointed — I'm really glad I did this as my undergrad. AI research however tends to go through periods of hype followed by disillusionment. There's a history of promising developments that hit a wall or fizzle out in the long run. That's not to say there hasn't been progress (there's been tons!), but based on track record alone, it's prude…

> we're probably much further from the "singularity" than one would think

For your - and my - sake I hope that that is true. If not all bets are off and you might not like the end results.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#163

Post by triska » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

ciscoriordan wrote: post #151

triska wrote: post #146

Personally, I find the lack of logic programming, and logic in general, a rather notable property of the outlined curriculum. In fact, "logic" is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the course titles. Neither are "formal" and "method". For comparison, at the department of AI in Edinburgh, Prolog was very important and even actively developed to such an extent that current Prolog systems are still hugely influenced by "Ed…

Math Foundations of Computer Science (15-151) covers proofs, combinatorics, etc. https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/course-profiles/15-151-Mathematical-F...

Yes, this is the book from the course's page:

http://www.math.cmu.edu/~jmackey/151_128/infdes.pdf

This definitely has some aspects of formal logic in it and contains a few definitions about proofs, theorems etc. The logic-oriented aspects are covered in Appendix B ("Foundations"), which is currently unfinished.

Still, this is no substitute for, and clearly does not intend to be, a course on formal logic, let alone logic programming or model checking.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#164

Post by jknoepfler » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

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 knowledge of computers, programming, math, and data science, which is honestly worse than no knowledge at all.

I'm not fundamentally opposed, but I think this is akin to creating a "Condensed Matter and Nanophysics" undergraduate degree alongside "Physics."

Changing the name of a factory will not change the output. The only solution to creating more and better AI research is to invest in better fundamentals in computer science and mathematics, then create pipelines for specialization. Slow and low.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#165

Post by fma » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

QML wrote: post #78

kendallpark wrote: post #70

If you are an undergraduate in computer science these days, it is very hard to get into advanced AI/ML classes, which are typically reserved for graduate students. Back before the ML goldrush, a strong CS undergrad interested in AI could elect to take advanced coursework beyond the introductory AI class. Nowadays, good luck getting off the waitlist! Having an official "AI major" does at least tell students, "Hey, we…

While there may be a lot of demand for AI/ML, I’m concerned to whether there are enough students with the proper foundations in math and stats to do well. New classes such as Data Science seem to just instruct students how to use algorithms and not why.

I see students that graduate with degrees in CS/IT to fill the demand. Quality has declined... Translating to AI/ML I would assume the same. I think CMU would retain quality, but the local universities will start churning out AI degrees like butter.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#166

Post by SanityIsRare » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #162

zukzuk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter I personally wasn't disappointed — I'm really glad I did this as my undergrad. AI research however tends to go through periods of hype followed by disillusionment. There's a history of promising developments that hit a wall or fizzle out in the long run. That's not to say there hasn't been progress (there's been tons!), but based on track record alone, it's prude…

> we're probably much further from the "singularity" than one would think For your - and my - sake I hope that that is true. If not all bets are off and you might not like the end results.

Singularity of stupidity is already here. I mean, you have to be pretty stupid to take something as absurd and sci-fi nerd bs like "singularity" seriously.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#167

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #155

imranq wrote: post #15

Is CMU trying to compete with Udacity? I personally couldn’t take a degree in AI seriously.

Are you really comparing CMU with Udacity? That's like comparing any Ferrari model with a Corolla. Not saying Udacity is bad. I mean a Corolla is a great, cheap, pragmatic and utilitarian car, just like Udacity is a great, cheap, pragmatic way to learn academic topics. But you really can't compare the two things. Carnegie Mellon and Udacity are extremely different and non-comparable in any rational way.

[deleted]

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#168

Post by harveynick » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #113

harveynick wrote: post #13

My undergraduate degree (from The University of Edinburgh) is Artificial Intelligence. I remember when I was visiting different universities in the UK back in 2000, Edinburgh was the only one I saw which offered AI as a "real" degree. Everywhere else it was a specialization which was tacked on in the final year of a computer science degree. That seemed really odd to me then. Seems even odder now.

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 taught. Generally for me, the highlights were any course taught by Barbara Webb or Jon Oberlander.

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#169

Post by fixermark » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:08 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #143

fixermark wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CMU doesn't generally craft their degrees for industry-marketability; even the CS degree operates under somewhat of an assumption that they're training you to be a CS grad student or professor, not a software engineer. You can find your way out of that program without ever having touched C++, for example. I think you're greatly underestimating how much different the CS curriculum would become if they tore out functio…

>CMU doesn't generally craft their degrees for industry-marketability; I don't think a CS degree should be a trade program, but avoiding actively harming students job prospects by adding a few more electives isn't quite the same things as crafting their degrees for industry-marketability. >they tore out functional programming above 15-150 I'm looking at the requirements for the BS in CS right now. I don't see any fun…

I stand corrected: since I took the curriculum, functional programming requirements seem to have been substituted with an option to do higher-level systems-engineering electives (such as 15-414). And the systems elective has been expanded to include parallel and distributed systems.

The key difference on the deep-theory side is that CS and AI appear to swap out deep-diving into discrete math for deep-diving into statistics and statistical modeling. I'd consider those different enough to warrant separate degree tracks, personally.

(Your opinion of networking is noted but I do not share it, being somewhat familiar with what that course asks of students. It's every bit as preparatory as its sibling 15-410 class ;) ).

Re: Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

#170

Post by zukzuk » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:11 PM UTC

Rescis wrote: post #159

zukzuk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my BSc at U of T, in Artificial Intelligence (and Cognitive Science)... in 2006. So ahead of the curve! This was right before the big deep learning explosion, at the very end of the last AI winter. Our lecturers spent a whole lot of time lamenting at the endless disappointments of AI research. I walked away deeply skeptical, and can't help but see the current ML hype as a glass half empty.

I'm currently about to enter my freshman year of College, and have been looking at majoring in Cognitive Science. What were your thoughts on it/it's applicability to the rest of your life?

I think it very much depends on where you're doing it. There are many approaches to cog sci, so your experience will likely be different depending on your profs, their schools of thought, and the kind of research being done at your institution. U of T at the time was dominated by people doing work in embodied cognition (e.g. Evan Thompson), neo-continentalism / phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and a few dynamical systems people. I very much enjoyed it, but I later learned that this was a rather unorthodox take on cognitive science, not at all representative of how things are done elsewhere. I'd stay away from programs too rooted in more traditional experimental cognitive psychology, or developmental psychology. To me this seems incredibly dry, but I guess it depends on your own personal proclivities.