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College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation
College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation
Am I the only one who read the title and was not sure if M.I.T was creating an AI college for students or for AI algorithms to earn accreditation?
College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation
I wonder if this attitude was a thing when CS was first introduced as a major. At the time it must have looked like someone basically took a tiny part of electrical engineering and made it into it's own field of study.
Historically, it was as likely to be part of the math department as it was to be part of electrical engineering. In part, this was because at the time electrical engineering was much more about analog circuits, power systems, etc.
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…
> approximating or beating human thought It must be noted, though, that "approximating human thought" is just one direction of investigation - and not the most important one at that; as interesting as it may be, it makes almost as much sense as trying to have computers resemble human brains. In other words, the true AI, when it arrives, will not think like us humans (even if at some level it might pretend that it doe…
Sort of my point. Current (by that I mean post-early 20th century) approaches were to mimic what we believe to be human reasoning. That's clearly limited.
> The AI will be just as "ethical" as a computer or an assault rifle.
I think that's reductive. Reasoning is not entirely analytical. There are other implications and concerns to artificial sentience.
College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation
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?
Back in the day we called ML "Pattern Recognition", I remember taking the course from Keinosuke Fukunaga at Purdue (good memories, I found out recently that his son is Gen Fukunaga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gen_Fukunaga).
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…
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 department. Won't be the first time.