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Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages
- tomcooks 7y agoCountry and language in a single drop-down menu, because in 2020 it's improbable that people born outside of a country speak any other language than their native tongue. Right?
- microcolonel 7y agoIt's the EU. You're not a full citizen (in the social sense) until you know the native language of your country of residence. How Czech are you if you can't hear the cabbies ripping you off?
- qwerty456127 7y agoRegardless to what country I was born in and what country I am a citizen of (by the way there are many full citizens who don't speak the language of the country particularly well, there is no such a thing as non-full citizenship, you either are a citizen or you are not) I have never wanted to study in its language (let alone use localized versions of coding-related software which I perceive as utter bullshit), wherever English is available I always choose to study and to interact with a computer in English. I'd never hire an AI/IT engineer who is not good at reading/writing/speaking on the subject in English and I doubt I'm alone in this. Arguably being able to efficiently communicate on the subject in English is even more important than the knowledge of the subject itself as nobody can know everything and be a good developer without being able to google things quickly.
- microcolonel 7y ago> interact with a computer in English I mean, there's no other language appropriate for working with modern computers (Russian is probably the closest second)[0], but the level of English computer programs require of you, especially cushioned ones like they're exposing to people in this case, tends to be less than native understanding of the language. [0]: English has a huge advantage because typesetting, typewriting, liberalism, and empire had already greatly simplified the writing system by the time computers were standardizing. It was, from the start of electronic computing, basically trivial to typeset English with simple character series, in a readable form. Anglo typewriting and typesetting conventions were already such that monospaced typewritten ASCII makes decent documents on its own.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's actually not all that bad, they put the accent on the language, not on the country and allow for countries that are multi-lingual. They could have left the country out completely and if you just ignore the country then it works fine.
- dustincoates 7y agoThat's not the way I read it, but it did take a while to get to that point. It appears as if the course has already launched in four languages, and the drop-down is for requesting regional variations of languages. If you want to take it in the existing languages, you can here: https://www.elementsofai.com/ https://www.elementsofai.com/ (which is probably a better link overall).
- yorwba 7y agoIf you were born in Hungary and live in Ireland, but want to access the course content in German as standardized in Luxembourg, you select "German (Luxembourg)". The country only serves to disambiguate multiple variants of the same language.
- jeroen 7y agoIt’s language and country-specific variants of said language. What is weirder (but not the first time I have seen it) is that the list of languages is sorted by country name. German comes before Danish and Dutch after Maltese.
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- 3guk 7y agoNice to see that they've already removed the UK from the list of European countries.....
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- hacker_news_man 7y agoTop of the mornin' to ya laddie.
- jacknews 7y agoOnly in English, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian? At least the language dropdown seems to be intelligable in all languages. Compared to getting stuck in google maps in, say, Russia, where even the 'change language' menu item is in Russian, so of course you can't even find it to change to English unless you can read Russian, or happen to know where itt is already.
- jacquesm 7y agoAs opposed to 'just English' which is more or less the norm in start-up land?
- jacknews 7y agostartup land is silicon valley, usually targeting the US. An AI course targeted at Europe should at least include German, French, Spanish, etc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 7y agoNo, it should include what they have and make room for the rest.
- pelliphant 7y agoWhy? 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?
- toolslive 7y agoYou 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.
- dash2 7y agoWhy 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?
- WanderPanda 7y agoThe EUSSR overlords know what is good for you.
- euroPoor 7y agoHow is this a useful comment
- lwhi 7y agoWhat leads you to believe this is being paid for by your taxes?
- Tenoke 7y agoIt says so in the first and main block of text on the page.
- lwhi 7y ago?
- wjnc 7y agoSeriously, you expect him to not be Finnish or an EU inhabitant and there not going any EU euros into this project? And his point seems quite right. There are so many MOOCS in this segment, we don't need a government picking winners and paying for translation in a time when a very large part of tertiary education in Europe is already in English. On top of that, given that it's the Finish presidency choosing Helsinki university, I doubt they've followed the procurement rules the EU dictates.
- happppy 7y agodropdown in footer to select country and language has white background with white text.
- pasiaj 7y agoElements of AI was created as a collaboration by University of Helsinki, the Finnish government and Reactor Innovations, a software consultancy. It was well received by the Finnish general populace. The Finnish government currently acts as the EU presidency, and decided to open access to all Europeans.
- jotm 7y agoThat's great, it would be even better if it was open to everyone, you know, in line with EU values (democracy, education for all, freedom, etc.) :/
- anttipoi 7y agoIt is. You're free to start learning. Today's announcement means more translations in European languauges.
- JTuck394 7y agoAgreed. 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...
- bentsku 7y agoIt is free for all. It just means EU languages. The title was incomplete here on HN.
- rat9988 7y agoThe white term is terribly misplaced.
- vinay427 7y agoYeah, 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.
- jotm 7y agoKind of off-putting... EU only, really? Also "English (Ireland)" heh For everyone else, use a VPN, I doubt they check anything.
- anttipoi 7y agoIt is completely free, globally. This announcement was more about translations, really.
- jotm 7y agoAh OK, I see here that anyone can sign up (for the English course) https://course.elementsofai.com/ https://course.elementsofai.com/ I guess it's just that landing page :)
- s_dev 7y agoAlot of Euronet ATMs in Ireland now say English with the tricolour beside it one of the unintended side affects of Brexit.
- meitham 7y agoUK isn't listed though we haven't left the EU yet! Damn Brexit!
- purple-again 7y agoCan we change the title to soon free for all or soon available in all EU languages? As you can tell from the comments here the title is unnecessarily divisive and doesn't seen to jive with what the website says or the Finnish governments intentions: Quote from website: "The Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU has decided to invest in people’s future skills and will make the Elements of AI online course freely available in all official EU languages."
- Anchor 7y agoMakes sense. Changed from "Elements of AI course soon free for all EU citizens" to "Elements of AI course soon available in all EU languages".
- Havoc 7y agoIf I'm German but want English lang which do I select? There is one selector for both
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nebulous1 7y agoOP oddly linked to the page where you sign up for languages that they haven't released yet. Just go to the home page and select English.
- tekkk 7y agoWell.. it is nice, I guess, but really dumbed down version in my opinion to actually be of practical use. Sure it's great publicity for Reaktor and Finland and whatnot, but I'm dubious of its actual benefits. Teaching basic statistics would be much more useful than "AI", but I guess it lacks the hype factor so marketing-wise it wouldn't just be as cool. It's as if there wasn't enough of snake oil salesman promoting their business as "AI-powered" already. And what AI does even mean in current context? A bag of machine learning algorithms? I always likened AI to be more of general AI rather than how it's nowadays labelled.
- weego 7y agobeing AI is a way for ML startups to get triple the seed capital. Nothing more. I would argue against this course having no benefits. There is a huge disconnect between what the reality of the near-future in tech is and what the media mis-represent it to be, often fuelled by interviews and quotes from the people directly benefiting from stoking the fire. The general populace being much closer to a position to understand that it's actually largely unrealistic or nonsense is the right way to go about bridging the gap between the "tech class" and your average lay person. I definitely agree that society in general would be better if people had better grasp of statistics and how they are manipulated and mis-represented to them, but there are so many interest areas that people would be better off for having some understanding of that I don't think any one can be discredited just because it's not one of the others.
- unglaublich 7y agoThe hype factor has always been used to teach people things that they otherwise find boring. So, if that is what is need to get people on board of the AI.., ahem, statistics train, then it's fine with me.
- pelliphant 7y agoI don't disagree with you, except for the part about actual benefits, it might be true for the general "hacker news crowd", but anything that makes people understand statistics slightly better is good in my book. If it takes hype, advertising and buzz-words to do that, I'm ok with that.
- enriquto 7y agoI 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, I cannot but feel dismay about this continuous lack of tact from my institutions. I know this is due to ignorance more than malice, but it really looks as if the institutions are purposely shadowing our very existence.
- MartianSquirrel 7y agoI could be mistaken, but it seems like they translated it in EU countries official languages, which is why Irish is present but not Catalan.
- enriquto 7y agoYes, it seems to be this. I hope this is a default list of languages, and more languages may be added if requested.
- pelliphant 7y agoOk, I can understand that it sucks that your language is excluded, but I think it would make way more sense to try to get your language recognized as an official eu language instead of critizising a finnish project for limiting their selection to official eu languages. With that said, if catalan was added, would you actually use that instead of english for a course like this?
- enriquto 7y ago> it would make way more sense to try to get your language recognized as an official eu language instead of critizising a finnish project for limiting their selection to official eu languages I agree 100% with this. My intention is not to criticize the organizers of this course that made a very reasonable choice. The problem here is the rather absurdl (in my view) selection of official EU language. It would make more sense to me to declare English the sole official language of the union. This would not favor any big country now that the UK is out. > With that said, if catalan was added, would you actually use that instead of english for a course like this? Of course! I use all my software localized into catalan, even vim! Now, for technical documentation it is rare to find much in my language, almost everything is in english only. If this (quite serious) course was translated I would be even happier to follow it (but I might do it anyway if it was english only, as I'm used to it).
- enriquto 7y agoThis title has been misleadingly edited, removing a crucial word. In the linked article, it states that the course will be available "in all official EU languages", which is indeed the case. The word "official" has been removed from the title, thus giving a very different indication of the actual set of languages in question.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoThe 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.
- verttii 7y agoA lot of Finnish taxpayers' money was spent developing it. I think it's fair to criticize its shortcomings openly.
- pergadad 7y agoUninformed nonsense. Its Finnish EU PRESIDENCY, which means it's paid by the EU budget. Each EU country holds the rotating EU presidency for six months, which means they chair interministerial meetings, formally negotiate and propose compromise legal texts, etc. In this role the presidency receives a budget for promotional events, communication efforts, etc. The Finnish presidency decided to use part of the budget for this translation effort. This seems to fit various EU goals well, eg to upskill the population, promote digital competences and encourage use of all 24 EU languages. Think of just the added value of having common terminology and definitions.
- pergadad 7y agoApologies I realise the start of my comment is a bit harsh. I do find out really frustrating to see people many up facts and half-truths as they go along.
- verttii 7y agoThe course was developed quite some time ago by the University of Helsinki with their funds. It's a public university like all Finnish universities, meaning it is funded by taxes. What's news here is the translation job to translate it to multiple European languages. It takes an additional 1,7 million € and is funded solely by the Ministry of Employment and the Economy of Finland. I failed to find any claims of EU funding any part of the original development or this translation job. The Finnish Ministry of Employment calls this course a gift from Finland to the European Union. What's your source on this being EU funded?
- pjmlp 7y agoI just look forward to see Portuguese from Portugal being offered and not another variant.
- PunchTornado 7y agopeople would say what's the point of this if every programmer knows English. People who say this never worked in Italy or Spain. I was surprised when I worked in Milan how little English my fellow teammates spoke.
- anticensor 7y agoWhy is Turkish (one of the two national languages of Cyprus, one of the recognised minority languages in BiH) missing?
- skissane 7y agoTurkish is not an official language of the EU. Not every national language of EU member states is an EU official language. Luxembourgish and Turkish are national languages of Luxembourg and Cyprus respectively but are not EU official languages. EU official languages are specified by the EU treaties. In cases of enlargement, they are negotiated between the EU and the acceding state. When Cyprus joined the EU, Cyprus and the EU agreed that Turkish would not be added to the list of EU official languages. (Also, the fact that Turkish is a minority language in BiH is of little relevance. BiH is not an EU member state, and most minority languages of EU member states are not EU official languages either.)