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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

#171

Post by derangedHorse »

gajjanag wrote: post #169
nkozyra wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me, but having gone through all the stats and maths behind ML, it seems like ultimately the less interesting part (though to be fair, algorithm design is similarly uninteresting for similar reasons). We're talking about a lot of very long-in-the-tooth concepts that are still the basis of many, many approaches. They're important, but it's well-worn territory. The underappreciated parts of AI, in my exp…

It definitely is not just you. I spent my first two years of PhD wrapping my head around the stats and maths commonly used in ML, and realized that mathematically (as "theoretical" ML is practiced today), most answers are already provided in classical work of statisticians and probabilists. There are many fascinating questions of probability theory and statistics, but most have little to do with AI. In fact, in terms…

I see a lot of graduate students focusing on practical uses of ML algorithms as a result of this. A lot of people don't realize that a good portion of the math is already figured out, and that it's in the implementation of these algorithms that they can find more interesting results.

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

#172

Post by anonymous5133 »

moneil971 wrote: post #112
skeptic_69 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, collaborations and publishing innovative research/experimentation go much further than trying to do a course simplified to the level that it can be taken online.

I view the online education/MOOC type stuff being for teaching the basics. For example, have the undergrad curriculum be online and basically free. If people want to go to grad school at MIT or wherever, then have them take an extremely hard exam in the subject. I think overall, you would get higher caliber candidates this way just because of how big online education can scale.

The current education system is highly exclusionary based on characteristics that are obtained in high school and most of the characteristics are directly linked to income. The problem is many people can still go on to get these skills later in life but can't really get into MIT once they're adults. You can, in theory, but we all know in practice it is not realistic.

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

#173

Post by anonymous5133 »

mattferderer wrote: post #59
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…

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…

The big universities will NEVER give out high quality equivalents of their courses online. The problem is the undergrad tuition is helping to subsidize the higher-level research that MIT and other big name schools are known for. How many times have you heard the stories about how undergrads are being taught by TAs or graduate students because the professor is off doing some research.

MIT and the other schools know if they gave away their core curriculum's online that are basically the same thing then less people would want to go to the school at the current over inflated rates. If you guys are looking for a revolution in online education, I hate to say it, but don't look at traditional institutions to do it.

The revolution in online education will be done by someone similar to a Steve jobs or Jimmy Wales (wikipedia) that basically has no connections to the traditional education industry but is just very motivated to change the world for the better. We all know that teaching is not rocket science (many people can teach it) and most of the significant human knowledge is being written down in books. The only exception is for the stuff that is cutting edge latest research but of course people aren't going to learn those topics until they've learned all of the other known subject matter on the topic which is recorded in books. So overall, the goal here is to simply take those books, produce free equivalents of them (the knowledge in the books are NOT subject to copyright) and then create some sort of online self-study system where people can learn the material. Tools need to be created that help people to learn the knowledge on their own and offer innovate tools to self-study.

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

#174

Post by mogadsheu »

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…

>Maybe this was the only way to ensure the gift of all $350 million. Or to build multiple new buildings...

If it’s anything like the funding that goes to climate research, chunks of the gift will get funneled into projects that are tangentially associated with AI, for the reasons you mentioned.

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

#175

Post by therealmarv »

lacker wrote: post #151
therealmarv wrote: post #132

ever searched for a job in AI? They ALL (at least in Europe) want senior developers with 5-8 years experience in all sort of areas and no junior AI devs. Anybody is offering AI jobs (international) for people who got out of college and specialized in that? Looking for my brother, he is specialized in AI and looking for months for an AI job in Germany.

It's funny how much of a different world Europe seems. In Silicon Valley there are all sorts of AI jobs. I wonder if there are more AI jobs in San Francisco than in all of Europe.

it's not funny if you search for a job. They want developer or admin experts with ai knowledge but nobody is interested to invest in a newcomer (which means university degree with knowledge) in ai.

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

#176

Post by gumby »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #173
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…

The big universities will NEVER give out high quality equivalents of their courses online. The problem is the undergrad tuition is helping to subsidize the higher-level research that MIT and other big name schools are known for. How many times have you heard the stories about how undergrads are being taught by TAs or graduate students because the professor is off doing some research. MIT and the other schools know if…

> The problem is the undergrad tuition is helping to subsidize the higher-level research that MIT and other big name schools are known for.

Actually MIT undergrad tuition is about 14% of MIT's revenue and about 16% of expenses (all in, not just the teaching portion), numbers which have been remarkably stable over the last 30 years. Undergrads simply aren't that important to a major research institution like MIT which is better thought of as a big research lab with a small school attached (undergrads make up less than 20% of the personnel on campus).

> The big universities will NEVER give out high quality equivalents of their courses online... MIT and the other schools know if they gave away their core curriculum's online that are basically the same thing then less people would want to go to the school at the current over inflated rates.

Except Open Courseware (thank you Hal Abelson) is exactly that: typically everything handed out by the prof including syllabus, lecture notes, problem sets, clarification notes...everything! And videos of lectures in some cases. And the motivation was precisely the opposite of what you say: "we assembled this stuff; perhaps it's useful for you to make your own course too."

> If you guys are looking for a revolution in online education, I hate to say it, but don't look at traditional institutions to do it....The revolution in online education will be done by someone ... that basically has no connections to the traditional education industry but is just very motivated to change the world for the better.

Umm, maybe. Sadly, a big part of higher education is credentialism, and for that you need to tie back to institutions. And the big institutions have an interest in such experimentation for the standard big institutional reasons that are not specific to universities (the "satellite campus" system has worked for some big institutions like NYU, and their students in, say, Abu Dabi who never go to NY at all) and there's no reason to think that similar classes of experiments could happen via linkups like U of Il + Coursera).

But I agree that new entrants like Kahn are doing interesting experiments that might have a huge, benefit effect in the long run.

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

#178

Post by eggie »

ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #57
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…

AI isn't a method, it's a field of trying to solve problems through an almost pure computational mean. People tend to think of it as machine learning, but there's a whole range of mathematics and computer science related to solving these kinds of problems. In this sense, PDE-constrained optimal control of power grids, parameter estimation of pharmacometric models, robotics and automation, and bioinformatic advances l…

> bioinformatic advances like automated cell detection for enhanced next-generation sequencing techniques

Do you have a citation for this advance?

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

#179

Post by uryga »

Qqqwxs wrote: post #162
uryga wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hardware is getting to brain level capabilities in processing power is it? not picking a fight, but i was under the impression that we're nowhere near. could you expand on this?

My understanding is that you can't really compare processing powers between brains and computers. They work differently and are better at different things. Nobody is going to be better at raw number crunching than a computer, but there's also no computer that can recognise patterns as well as your brain can. At this point in time, the computer vs brains argument is very situational.

> My understanding is that you can't really compare processing powers between brains and computers.

I agree – I guess I papered over this and basically interpreted GP as saying "computers are getting fast enough to be able to emulate the brain's pattern recognition skills", which seems way too strong – hence my question.

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

#180

Post by anonymous5133 »

gumby wrote: post #176
anonymous5133 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big universities will NEVER give out high quality equivalents of their courses online. The problem is the undergrad tuition is helping to subsidize the higher-level research that MIT and other big name schools are known for. How many times have you heard the stories about how undergrads are being taught by TAs or graduate students because the professor is off doing some research. MIT and the other schools know if…

> The problem is the undergrad tuition is helping to subsidize the higher-level research that MIT and other big name schools are known for. Actually MIT undergrad tuition is about 14% of MIT's revenue and about 16% of expenses (all in, not just the teaching portion), numbers which have been remarkably stable over the last 30 years. Undergrads simply aren't that important to a major research institution like MIT which…

I think we will be able to disrupt higher education credentialism. I disagree with your idea that it needs to tie back to institutions. It does not. It simply needs to be able to show to employers that the credential has value. That's it!
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