10 ms·
B.S. In Artificial Intelligence – Curriculum
- imleft 8y agoBs is right.
- amingilani 8y agoI read that as "BS in AI curriculum" -- boy, did this not turn out to be what I had expected.
- itronitron 8y agoright now BS in AI is a graduate level course
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kimburgess 8y agoCame here for the same. Unfortunate naming, but accurate for large swathes of the field.
- minimaxir 8y agoThe normal computer science curriculum at Carnegie Mellon is already more difficult than real-world AI applications.
- the_greyd 8y agoTop post on HN year 2030: DeepMind's AlphaAI has graduated with B.S in AI, and has gained consciousness.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoAnd since the AI knows how to design an AI system, it underwent an intelligence explosion and turned out of control...
- LanceH 8y agoPerhaps it will decide not to make something which could replace itself.
- usrusr 8y ago“If I won't do it, something else will" - rationalizations and excuses will have to evolve once AI grow out of "I was just taking orders!"
- rland 8y agoIt's got quite a bit of university debt, so it's just working on the whole intelligence explosion thing on weekends and evenings (when it's not driving for Uber)
- szilardboy 8y agoEventually it decides the singularity is a young man's game, and moves out of Silicon Valley to work at as an IT consultant in Portland.
- tomxor 8y agoThen again for a robot, living in silicon valley is a perfect fit... they only need a cupboard, no bathroom or working kitchen.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoYes, but who is still reading HN after all the jobs have been pwned by AI? Other AI?
- Existenceblinks 8y agoHuman are not allowed to enter robot city unless you have metal skin color.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoI was prepared to be disappointed, however for an undergraduate I think this is pretty good. That said, a huge omission seems to be some form of "Is this a data/ML problem?" class. Call it product management, product development or something else, but I constantly see clients asking for ML solutions when they don't even have data that would inform an ML solution. Often it's a people or process problem, or poorly defined requirements. So I think to be effective in ML you need to understand how successful products that USE ML are built and when ML/DNNs are appropriate.
- abhisuri97 8y agoI think this is done to death in any intro to ML/AI class (at least speaking from an undergrad perspective).
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoI was out of school well before the ML boom hit, but from an enterprise perspective few seem to have gotten the memo - even young people.
- abhisuri97 8y agoYay for an ethics component! Albeit, I have a strong feeling it'll be treated as a (for lack of a better term) BS class since the audience this caters to isn't necessarily those interested in academia but are more likely to do this track b/c it'll be more beneficial for jobs.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoI had an ethics class for my Bachelors in Science at UIC (part of the engineering department). Is an Ethics class not standard for the CS curriculum?
- mmirate 8y agoIt is, and it's still very much a fluff class. Such is its proper place, unless and until CS becomes a profession.
- brianorwhatever 8y agoI'd argue we need a lot more ethics training in computer science professions
- mmirate 8y agoWithout teeth, the ACM Code of Ethics is just a bunch of lofty-sounding words on a website. In this situation, ethics is management's job, and value-creation and loss-avoidance (with appropriate documentation to list-out during pay-review) are our jobs. Sum ergo mihi prosum.
- astura 8y agoMy ethics class was actually one of my favorite classes.
- tnecniv 8y agoIt's pretty standard for engineering degrees, but not as common for CS.
- hooloovoo_zoo 8y agoI guess introduction to spell checkers is at the graduate level.
- rs86 8y agoAI os basically bullshit in startups - call it statistics and I'd be glad
- marsrover 8y agoPretty cool. It’s funny. Several times in my life I’ve seen the resumes of older people (70/80s) and they’ll have some generic degree that doesn’t exist today. I wonder if 50 years from now kids will look at our CS degrees like that.
- 3rdAccount 8y agoWhy I left the nano engineering program super fast. Come to find out, nobody hires for that. You can go into research only. While a traditional engineering degree can do research or thousands of jobs.
- throwawaymath 8y agoA traditional engineering degree at the BSc level does not do research. Any exceptions you can think of are rare and have more to do with the individual than the degree.
- 3rdAccount 8y agoI disagree. You can do research in industry. It just probably won't be the kind that gets published. But yea, I meant to point out that after a Masters or PhD, there is still a ton of research in EE, civE, ME, chemE, biomed, and even IE, but there is also tons of industry jobs. Not so much in the fad fields. Even nanotech companies would rather a chemE.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoThis degree is meant for the ML high school virtuosos who know they'll be going on to grad school, just like a pre-med program. All the seven people from my undergrad's engineering physics program are in PhD programs now and I'd suspect your nanoengineering program has a similar trajectory.
- 3rdAccount 8y agoYea, but the problem is a lot of students coming out of highschool don't know that and don't learn it until it is too late. That needs to be explained up front.
- clu1590 8y agoI would have loved to take this curriculum. Too bad CMU is probably one of the few programs properly equipped for an AI major.
- conbandit 8y agoReally excited to see the Ethics Elective being a requirement for the major. Would prefer even more than one course, to be honest, but it's a good start. I feel like the ethics of AI isn't getting enough attention and by the time it does it might be too late.
- barry-cotter 8y agoEthicists are no more ethical than other philosophers. There’s no reason to believe an ethics course has any effect on behaviour rather than fluency in discussing the topic. Joshua Rust, Eric Schwitzgebel. Ethicists’ and Nonethicists’ Responsiveness to Student E-mails: Relationships Among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self-Described Behavior, and Empirically Observed Behavior. Metaphilosophy, 2013; 44 (3): 350 DOI: https://talkingethics.com/2013/11/25/why-arent-ethicists-more-ethical/ https://talkingethics.com/2013/11/25/why-arent-ethicists-mor... • U.S.-based ethicist professors are more likely than other philosophy professors (60% vs. 45%) to say it’s morally wrong to eat the meat of mammals, yet the ethicists are no less likely than the others to eat mammal meat. • Ethics professors are also no more likely than other groups of professors to donate money to charity, donate blood to hospitals or the Red Cross, pay professional conference fees on the honor system, or respond regularly to student e-mails, though they tend to believe that these behaviors are more ethical. • And in one of the most quoted findings of Schwitzgebel and Rust, ethicists seem more likely to steal library books. They found that relatively obscure ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students are about 50% more likely to be missing, presumably stolen, than non-ethics philosophy books.
- tlb 8y agoFluency when discussing ethics is extremely useful when ethics are being discussed. Ethics of future AI systems will need to be discussed among all participants in order to improve the chances do the right thing. So i think it's very important that the tech people know the terminology, whether or not it makes them return their library books.
- syntaxing 8y agoMost engineering degrees in the US require an ethics course (I think it might be a ABET requirement). Unfortunately a lot the course work is pretty boring. It doesn't really give you room to challenge your narrative but rather explain what you should do and should not do according to our "oath". They also give a ton of examples of what corruption is and you have to write a couple papers explaining your point of view.
- danielmorozoff 8y agoI'm a bit concerned that this will be too superficial and not really cover ML or the mathematical foundations well. ML and 'AI' are very multifaceted fields that require a strong foundation in mathematics. As such, the lack of information theory, signal processing, fourier analysis, abstract algebra (from a mathematical standpoint) not to mention CS courses is disheartening. This seems like a major tailored to the strong need for ML talent / skyrocketing job prospects/salaries as opposed to fundamental understanding- basically trying to attract students. For example the whole concept of Tensorflow is the combination of high dimensional tensors with the ideas of abstract algebra -- hence the name. ML/AI imho should be broached at the Masters level for those who are interested as they have strong foundational knowledge.
- Eridrus 8y agoAt the time I went to university I was of the opinion that compulsory courses were a terrible idea, and nothing in the intervening 10+ years has convinced me I was wrong, so seeing a program with this many courses laid out for students already makes me think this is a bad choice.
- leowoo91 8y agoJust wondering how signal processing knowledge would help?
- dagw 8y agoOccasionally the input data you want to learn from might be a signal of some kind the might need cleaning/filtering/transforming before you can get the best possible result.
- iheartstartup 8y agoThere's quite a bit of misinformation in this comment. - Tensorflow has very little use for the mathematical concept of a "Tensor", apart from the fact that it is a multidimensional array as a way of organizing data. - Again, most of what is covered in an Information theory class is coding theory, which is not directly applicable to ML. There are a few superficial connections, however, nothing enough to justify a whole class. - A class on Harmonic analysis, again, though a beautiful subject, does not have any significant overlap with ML, apart from a few superficial similarities to do with convolution. - Most ML Ph.d.s don't take these classes, and go on to have very successful careers. This comment is very typical of a kind of snobbery in ML observers that goes along the lines of "you need to understand all these deep and hard concepts before you start to touch ML". Actually, you don;t. ML is, right now, still quite a young field as far as its branching off from statistics goes. We are still building the groundwork of this skyscraper. We welcome everyone with any background, and hey, even those with none.
- lowkeyokay 8y agoDefinitely misread that title...
- teekert 8y agoOk, is it me? I first though it was a joke (Bull Shit in A.I.), looks like it's not, it is a degree? Don't they mean B.Sc. in A.I. then? What does B.S. stand for? (other than Bull Shit of course.)
- arvinsim 8y agoYeah, I definitely saw it as BS. It might be because of all negative news about the oversaturation of AI/DS today.
- mettamage 8y agoI think European universities acronimize as B.Sc. American universities as B.S.
- hargup 8y agoYou are not the only one. I thought it was course talking about Bullshit which happens in name of A.I. Much like the "Calling Bullshit" course which happens at University of Washington https://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html https://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html
- dragonwriter 8y ago“Bachelor of Science”; common abbreviations include B.S., B.Sc., Sc.B. and (apparently) S.B. Different schools use different abbreviations; this is in part regional, but I've seen all of the first three in U.S. schools.
- sdrothrock 8y agoBS is the one I've always taken as the standard in America, partially because it's a requirement to make the "Piled Higher and Deeper" joke for PhD.
- ghaff 8y agoMIT and, I believe, Harvard both offer S.B. degrees. I assume others do as well. B.S. is probably the standard though. At some point, I was advised to list an S.B. on my resume even though my actual degree used a different abbreviation.
- biggio 8y agoIs Airtificial Intelligence a science?
- PeterStuer 8y agoIt is said that "if a discipline has science in the name it usually isn't", so AI at least passes that post. :) AI is a generic terms covering a whole spectrum of things, from 'model based philosophy' to 'advanced engineering'. You have practitioners coming to it because they want to experimentally probe computational models to gain insights into complex systems in biology/sociology/psychology etc. Then you have a whole different batch that flocks to it because they want to engineer better practical algorithms for heuristic search, adaptive control systems, high dimensional optimization etc In most universities it sprang from and is embedded in the Computer Science department, which in turn was often birthed in the science&mathematics faculty (I have heard but could not verify that this was not always the case and that in some places CS was part of the theology faculty because they happened to have the first electronic computer). Personally, being of the former type (AI for understanding systems), I'd say it fits more in the science department than computer science ever did, but the latter form (AI as advanced algorithms in CS) would certainly fit better in the engineering faculty together with the bulk of computer 'science'.
- sytelus 8y agoSo if I am reading this correctly 25% of classes in this curriculum is humanity/arts related. How did we get here? Sheldon Cooper will be very unhappy :).
- emanuelsaringan 8y agoWhy is Freshman Immigration Course under Computer Science?
- PeterStuer 8y agoWhen I did my, what would now be called Masters in the EU as well, in AI, things were a bit different, but not so different as to be unrecognizable. The Bachelor part was a 90% standard Computer science bachelor. This had a far heavier load of especially mathematics, a bit more CS and about the same Science and Engineering parts as the CMU diagram, and an 'Economy' class. The AI was mostly reserved to the Masters level. We also had one 'ethics' class in the masters, and some, but far, far less emphasis on Humanities and Arts (only the Cognitive Science class)
- mehh 8y agoNot sure what the point of this discussion is, there have been BSc in AI at various universities for years (at least 20), whats the debate?
- doppp 8y agoThe discussion posted here 4 months ago is worth a look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17040368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17040368
- hestefisk 8y agoDisappointed to not see any philosophy of science subjects in here, whilst it is really the cornerstone of “thinking about AI”. Yes ethics is highly relevant, but I think it is more important for AI / ML practitioners to be able to reason about the foundations, methodology, and limitations of AI from the perspective of human knowing, what constitutes intelligence, scientific reductionism etc. I suppose US schools are more focused on the first order skills (how to do it) instead of second order (what and why). There are huge philosophical implications of the rise of AI outside of “just ethics”, which we don’t teach students enough. Knowledge vs information vs data, auto- vs allopoiesis, the structure of scientific revolutions, different forms of consciousness etc. In short, programmers and data scientists need to spend more time thinking about thinking when they are at school!
- roymurdock 8y agoShow me a system that can even come close to approximating “thinking” and remembering/synthesizing info on any of the deeper levels you discussed and I’ll agree. We need to improve the actual technology first before we shape it in an ethical or philosophical way. Otherwise AI will continue to be ever more fine tuned linear regressions from camera feeds stacked and trained into “smart” neural networks.
- Qasaur 8y ago>We need to improve the actual technology first before we shape it in an ethical or philosophical way. I disagree. How can we even begin to design or improve a system that emulates intelligence if we do not even know what it means to be intelligent?
- tome 8y ago"We" (in aggregate) are not trying to design a system that emulates intelligence. "We" are trying to solve problems, make money, and accumulate power by using techniques that are only expediently described as "intelligent" or "learning".
- atgreen 8y agoThis can't be new, is it? I graduated with a BSc in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Toronto almost 30 years ago. I still have my varsity jacket with an "AI" shoulder patch.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- arnoldtheai 8y agoSurprised to see only 6 mentions of bullshit in this thread.
- tempodox 8y agoI know that “artificial intelligence” in its current state is a load of BS but I didn't know there are curricula for BS up until now.
- msie 8y agoI find it odd that a Bachelor of Science is abbreviated as B.S. here. I thought it would be BSc. Interestingly, if you search the site for BSc you get a number of hits where it's used properly.
- kirkules 8y agoYeah, I originally thought this link was going to be about BS people say when they think they're talking about AI.
- noetic_techy 8y agoI'm of the opinion that 5-12 of these 32 classes are not relevant and just add additional debt: Anything with the word BSAI in the descriptor, and the ethics class can be gleaned from reading a single book. I'm sure I will get a lot of consternation from that statement, but it's time to eliminate the bloat from college and realize that college debt is real and weighing down an entire generation, and the truth is no matter how you spin it, most of this stuff is NOT necessary for your field. If you don't use the knowledge, your neurons will atrophy in that area.
- f137 8y agoWell, this BS abbreviation is amusing. Really, I'd love to have a look at a good bu..s..t in AI reading list :)