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Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

elementsofai.com

81–90 of 103 posts

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Sure, it would be nice with more languages, but if someone from germany/france/spain want's to learn study AI, isn't it probable that they are used to reading english anyway?

You would think that, but I've seen Germans with a PhD that don't speak English. Once a language is large enough, most things get translated into that language (as there is a market for it). Anyway, German and French are large enough, Dutch isn't.

I've never encountered a single AI or CS paper translated to or written in German. You may not need to speak English for a PhD in, say, law, but you can't be a competent computer scientist only knowing German.

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think that, but I've seen Germans with a PhD that don't speak English. Once a language is large enough, most things get translated into that language (as there is a market for it). Anyway, German and French are large enough, Dutch isn't.

I've never encountered a single AI or CS paper translated to or written in German. You may not need to speak English for a PhD in, say, law, but you can't be a competent computer scientist only knowing German.

You need to search harder, I guess.

As someone that graduated during the 90's, and had graphics programming as one of my main focus, there were plenty of German only papers out of Darmstadt.

We had a couple of proceedings books with them on our university library.

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#84

The comments here are surprisingly negative. So many wet blankets, from people saying the offering sucks to people mistakenly complaining about it being EU-only to someone saying it empowers just white europe. I wonder how many people criticizing it even planned on trying this completely-free course. I think we really need to work on pulling the plug on this fetishization of contrarianism as a community.

A lot of Finnish taxpayers' money was spent developing it. I think it's fair to criticize its shortcomings openly.

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#85

I wonder if there is a rationale for this particularly strange selection of languages. They propose, for example, Irish (Gaelic), which is the native language of about 80.000 european citizens and is understood by about a million. Yet they do not propose Catalan, which is the native language of 4.1 million and understood by about ten million. As a staunch partisan for the unity of the EU, and native Catalan speaker,…

They probably mean English, not Irish (unless someone confirms it is actually in Gaelic)

I would agree with your point, having a Catalan version would be more impactful.

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#87

I wonder if there is a rationale for this particularly strange selection of languages. They propose, for example, Irish (Gaelic), which is the native language of about 80.000 european citizens and is understood by about a million. Yet they do not propose Catalan, which is the native language of 4.1 million and understood by about ten million. As a staunch partisan for the unity of the EU, and native Catalan speaker,…

They probably mean English, not Irish (unless someone confirms it is actually in Gaelic) I would agree with your point, having a Catalan version would be more impactful.

This is the list of official EU languages, to which Irish (Gaelic) belongs, but not Catalan. Reading the article carefully reveals that they propose the course precisely in the official EU languages.

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to 'just English' which is more or less the norm in start-up land?

startup land is silicon valley, usually targeting the US. An AI course targeted at Europe should at least include German, French, Spanish, etc.

I think it's actually detrimental. You will lose opportunities if you stick with any language but English for programming related things. Your translations won't be perfect. You won't be able to communicate with people in other countries. You will miss new important developments and discussion all of it happening in English. It's just much more efficient for everyone to swallow the pride and accept English as the language of programming/computer science.

I am not a native English speaker. I am not very talented when it comes to learning languages. It took me many years to be able to understand written and spoken English. Still I am very grateful that once I got there the whole world is open to me. I can read every important publication, participate in discussions and read code other people write. Doing it in my native language is just putting artificial barriers out there. It doesn't make sense. Learning about computer science in my native language just makes it less efficient and introduce problems like quality of the translation or terms lacking necessary context and usage patterns (as there is less published in that language).

I feel efforts to translate to other European languages will be detrimental to general level of education and communication in future businesses. Publish only in English, it forces people to learn it. It's better for everyone in the end. If you know you had to learn it to be a competent programmer or scientist or other IT specialist you will and by doing so you will contribute to removing barriers that exist in EU which Americans don't have to deal with. I believe it's one of the big advantages US IT sector has over Europeans.

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#89
post #17

Why are my taxes paying for some random course? How is this a sensible use of government money? Why not a course on flower arranging? Which "entrepreneur" wangled this boondoggle? What vast sums are they getting paid for a few tweetsie javascript animations of knn? In short, WTF?

> How is this a sensible use of government money? What, education?

No, translation to other languages. It's kinda strange that Finnish government pays for translations to Spanish or French or German. If I were a Finnish citizen that would definitely that wouldn't sit well with me.

Re: Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages

#90
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'll probably get down voted for speaking the truth but at this point opening the course up to EU citizens is doing nothing but protecting power and privilege of (white) Europe. The course should be opened to everyone in the world. Really disappointed but what do you expect? Just goes to show how far we have left to go...

The white term is terribly misplaced.

Yeah, what about white people in Switzerland. /s

I was genuinely surprised to see the mention of a skin color, even in parentheses which seemed like an attempt to make it one of their points while avoiding justifying or explaining it.

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