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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), an

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 that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely. Maybe this was the only way to ensure the gift of all $350 million. Or to build multiple new buildings...

rorykoehler 8y ago
> Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely. I don't see why not? We are a long way away from general AI.
nopinsight 8y ago
> AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. The current field of AI might not yet be as broad or deep as the fields you mentioned. The science and engineering of intelligence, however, holds potentials to be even deeper and more impactful than those fields. Intelligence underlies most human endeavors. Civilization itself would not be possible without it. It is the greatest distinction between us and other animals.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
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 like automated cell detection for enhanced next-generation sequencing techniques can easily fit under an AI umbrella. That makes it a huge interdisciplinary effort that can easily span a whole college, and something MIT is very well primed to succeed in.
- eggie 8y ago
  > bioinformatic advances like automated cell detection for enhanced next-generation sequencing techniques Do you have a citation for this advance?
mattferderer 8y ago
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 to be halfhearted attempts. UNC's online MBA requires video conferencing for discussion & is much more engaging. I guess $1 billion of server infrastructure & employees doesn't look as pretty though.
- skeptic_69 8y ago
  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.
  - moneil971 8y ago
    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.
    - anonymous5133 8y ago
      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.
kamaal 8y ago
>> AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. I guess by this move their goal is to now make it deep enough.
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely. Depends which departments/courses they're assimilating. Course 6 is computer science that holds CSAIL, course 9 is Brain and Cognitive Sciences that holds cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. CBMM encompasses everything from probabilistic programming to deep neural nets to classical computer vision. I think that if they take some of the more exciting but empirically rooted stuff from CBMM and build up a department that can actually train students for it in-depth, that will be a significant improvement in training tracks available to people now. Computational neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience, computational cognitive science, machine learning, statistical learning theory, etc all remain small specialties within larger fields when taken alone, but when put together really deserve to have their connections considered as potentially forming the foundations for a single field.
mturmon 8y ago
"...AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough..." Its ultimate subject is how to make machines think as well as brains think. Arguably, brains are the thing that distinguish homo sapiens from other animals, and we don't know how brains can be engineered or how such devices can be made efficient and accurate. If you conceptualize that math/engineering/biology/philosophy question holistically, it is definitely worth an independent college.
thrmsforbfast 8y ago
> 1) CMU establishing a 'department' of AI (where MIT had merely an AI track within the CS program) CMU's Machine Learning Department was founded in 2006, before the current AI hype cycle started. If this is MIT's response to a 'department' of AI, then MIT has been asleep for >10 years. Perhaps you mean CMU's new undergraduate AI degree. But that is not a new department. It's merely a separate major within the existing school. And not really comparable to MIT's recent announcement, which is much more focused on research than new undergraduate majors. > Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. The article discusses this point. Let's start from the premise that MIT is going to focus a lot its hiring efforts on "Computational X" for all X in which it hires. There are basically three advantages to introducing a new academic unit instead of hiring Computational X people into the X department: 1. Collaboration 2. The "X" department might be ossified and unwelcoming to "Computational X". So from a P&T incentive structure perspective, starting a new department/college can make sense. 3. Naming rights => $$$ > Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely. They're hiring 50 faculty, and half those lines will be dedicated to non computer scientists. That's larger than many R1 CS departments. So, they're certainly hiring enough manpower to run several innovative educational programs. This also explains why it's a college instead of a department. Hiring historians, philosophers, MD/PhDs, biologists, engineers, and computer scientists into the any single pre-existing college would be pretty awkward.
- skeptic_69 8y ago
  CMU does have a department of machine learning fyi. which is probably what the other guy was referring to since to most people ML = AI and AI = ML
  - thrmsforbfast 8y ago
    Yes, but he said this is a "response" to that, which doesn't really make any sense because CMU's ML dept has been around for a while.
perennate 8y ago
MIT's news article [1] has more concrete information. The NYT article is a bit misleading. It is a College of Computing, not College of AI. Also note that MIT has Schools (School of Engineering, School of Science, etc.), not Colleges; so this will be something different. For example, according to MIT's FAQ [2], EECS Department will likely continue to be part of School of Engineering, even as it becomes part of College of Computing. In particular: > The College will reorient MIT to bring the power of computing and AI to all fields of study at MIT, allowing the future of computing and AI to be shaped by insights from all other disciplines; > Q: Why is this a college, rather than a school? What is the difference? > A: The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will work with and across all five of MIT’s existing schools. Its naming as a college differentiates it from the five schools, and signals that it is an Institute-wide entity: The College is designed with cross-cutting education and research as its primary missions. > Q: What kinds of new joint academic programs or degrees are envisioned? > A: MIT has been making progress in this direction for some time; for example, we already offer undergraduate majors that pair computer science with economics, biology, mathematics, and urban planning. The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will allow MIT to respond to the student demand the Institute is seeing in course and major/minor selection more effectively and creatively. It will enable MIT to pursue this vision with unprecedented depth and ambition, and will give MIT’s five schools a shared structure for collaborative education, research, and innovation in computing and AI. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarzman-college-of-computing-1015 http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarz... [2] http://news.mit.edu/2018/faq-mit-stephen-schwarzman-college-of-computing-1015 http://news.mit.edu/2018/faq-mit-stephen-schwarzman-college-...
- jmmcd 8y ago
  I think the NYT headline is at fault here. College of Computing makes more sense than of AI. You can't put CSAIL inside a College of AI, for a start.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    Not to mention, the headline implies sending A.I.s to college. Now that would be progress.
smrtinsert 8y ago
As a newbie to AI and ML, what puzzles me most is that what is really to ultimately it to work is a very well optimized and trained model - but once you have that model, who do you need? Am I wrong in this understanding?
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. AI is a field that's over 60 years old, that includes at least half a dozen sub-fields, by my counting (say, NLP, speech processing, machine vision, robotics iiish, game-playing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, inference and reasoning, etc, and, of course, machine learning), with, oh I don't know, out of the top of my head, 50 or so conferences, and about a thousand journals? Thereabouts. That's broad enough and deep enough to warrant a couple of colleges alright. And if you take into account the age and breadth of subjects encompassed by many of the sub-fields of AI, you probably need a college for each.
willart4food 8y ago
Wouldn't The College for Artificial Intelligence run itself?
stale2002 8y ago
> Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed There was a point in time where this statement would sound true when describing computer science as a degree. People quite reasonably thought that CS should just stay under the math department. Yet look where we are today. Who's knows how much bigger the field will become in a couple decades.
mogadsheu 8y ago
>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.

rorykoehler 8y ago

> Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely. I don't see why not? We are a long way away from general AI.

nopinsight 8y ago

> AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. The current field of AI might not yet be as broad or deep as the fields you mentioned. The science and engineering of intelligence, however, holds potentials to be even deeper and more impactful than those fields. Intelligence underlies most human endeavors. Civilization itself would not be possible without it. It is the greatest distinction between us and other animals.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ChrisRackauckas 8y ago

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 like automated cell detection for enhanced next-generation sequencing techniques can easily fit under an AI umbrella. That makes it a huge interdisciplinary effort that can easily span a whole college, and something MIT is very well primed to succeed in.

eggie 8y ago
> bioinformatic advances like automated cell detection for enhanced next-generation sequencing techniques Do you have a citation for this advance?

mattferderer 8y ago

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 to be halfhearted attempts. UNC's online MBA requires video conferencing for discussion & is much more engaging. I guess $1 billion of server infrastructure & employees doesn't look as pretty though.

skeptic_69 8y ago
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.
- moneil971 8y ago
  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.
  - anonymous5133 8y ago
    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.

kamaal 8y ago

>> AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. I guess by this move their goal is to now make it deep enough.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

>Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely. Depends which departments/courses they're assimilating. Course 6 is computer science that holds CSAIL, course 9 is Brain and Cognitive Sciences that holds cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. CBMM encompasses everything from probabilistic programming to deep neural nets to classical computer vision. I think that if they take some of the more exciting but empirically rooted stuff from CBMM and build up a department that can actually train students for it in-depth, that will be a significant improvement in training tracks available to people now. Computational neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience, computational cognitive science, machine learning, statistical learning theory, etc all remain small specialties within larger fields when taken alone, but when put together really deserve to have their connections considered as potentially forming the foundations for a single field.

mturmon 8y ago

"...AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough..." Its ultimate subject is how to make machines think as well as brains think. Arguably, brains are the thing that distinguish homo sapiens from other animals, and we don't know how brains can be engineered or how such devices can be made efficient and accurate. If you conceptualize that math/engineering/biology/philosophy question holistically, it is definitely worth an independent college.

thrmsforbfast 8y ago

> 1) CMU establishing a 'department' of AI (where MIT had merely an AI track within the CS program) CMU's Machine Learning Department was founded in 2006, before the current AI hype cycle started. If this is MIT's response to a 'department' of AI, then MIT has been asleep for >10 years. Perhaps you mean CMU's new undergraduate AI degree. But that is not a new department. It's merely a separate major within the existing school. And not really comparable to MIT's recent announcement, which is much more focused on research than new undergraduate majors. > Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. The article discusses this point. Let's start from the premise that MIT is going to focus a lot its hiring efforts on "Computational X" for all X in which it hires. There are basically three advantages to introducing a new academic unit instead of hiring Computational X people into the X department: 1. Collaboration 2. The "X" department might be ossified and unwelcoming to "Computational X". So from a P&T incentive structure perspective, starting a new department/college can make sense. 3. Naming rights => $$$ > Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely. They're hiring 50 faculty, and half those lines will be dedicated to non computer scientists. That's larger than many R1 CS departments. So, they're certainly hiring enough manpower to run several innovative educational programs. This also explains why it's a college instead of a department. Hiring historians, philosophers, MD/PhDs, biologists, engineers, and computer scientists into the any single pre-existing college would be pretty awkward.

skeptic_69 8y ago
CMU does have a department of machine learning fyi. which is probably what the other guy was referring to since to most people ML = AI and AI = ML
- thrmsforbfast 8y ago
  Yes, but he said this is a "response" to that, which doesn't really make any sense because CMU's ML dept has been around for a while.

perennate 8y ago

MIT's news article [1] has more concrete information. The NYT article is a bit misleading. It is a College of Computing, not College of AI. Also note that MIT has Schools (School of Engineering, School of Science, etc.), not Colleges; so this will be something different. For example, according to MIT's FAQ [2], EECS Department will likely continue to be part of School of Engineering, even as it becomes part of College of Computing. In particular: > The College will reorient MIT to bring the power of computing and AI to all fields of study at MIT, allowing the future of computing and AI to be shaped by insights from all other disciplines; > Q: Why is this a college, rather than a school? What is the difference? > A: The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will work with and across all five of MIT’s existing schools. Its naming as a college differentiates it from the five schools, and signals that it is an Institute-wide entity: The College is designed with cross-cutting education and research as its primary missions. > Q: What kinds of new joint academic programs or degrees are envisioned? > A: MIT has been making progress in this direction for some time; for example, we already offer undergraduate majors that pair computer science with economics, biology, mathematics, and urban planning. The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will allow MIT to respond to the student demand the Institute is seeing in course and major/minor selection more effectively and creatively. It will enable MIT to pursue this vision with unprecedented depth and ambition, and will give MIT’s five schools a shared structure for collaborative education, research, and innovation in computing and AI. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarzman-college-of-computing-1015 http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarz... [2] http://news.mit.edu/2018/faq-mit-stephen-schwarzman-college-of-computing-1015 http://news.mit.edu/2018/faq-mit-stephen-schwarzman-college-...

jmmcd 8y ago
I think the NYT headline is at fault here. College of Computing makes more sense than of AI. You can't put CSAIL inside a College of AI, for a start.
- sevensor 8y ago
  Not to mention, the headline implies sending A.I.s to college. Now that would be progress.

smrtinsert 8y ago

As a newbie to AI and ML, what puzzles me most is that what is really to ultimately it to work is a very well optimized and trained model - but once you have that model, who do you need? Am I wrong in this understanding?

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. AI is a field that's over 60 years old, that includes at least half a dozen sub-fields, by my counting (say, NLP, speech processing, machine vision, robotics iiish, game-playing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, inference and reasoning, etc, and, of course, machine learning), with, oh I don't know, out of the top of my head, 50 or so conferences, and about a thousand journals? Thereabouts. That's broad enough and deep enough to warrant a couple of colleges alright. And if you take into account the age and breadth of subjects encompassed by many of the sub-fields of AI, you probably need a college for each.

willart4food 8y ago

Wouldn't The College for Artificial Intelligence run itself?

stale2002 8y ago

> Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed There was a point in time where this statement would sound true when describing computer science as a degree. People quite reasonably thought that CS should just stay under the math department. Yet look where we are today. Who's knows how much bigger the field will become in a couple decades.

mogadsheu 8y ago

>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.