
B.S. In Artificial Intelligence – Curriculum - harias
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curriculum
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danielmorozoff
I'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.

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iheartstartup
There'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.

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seanmcdirmid
Signal processing can be useful in a few ML domains (eg speech recognition),
it would be useful as an elective at least. The best ML researcher I know had
a leg up on the whole GPU DNN thing (way back in 2010!) because of his very
strong signal processing background (he has an EE degree).

But even a degree specifically on ML isn’t going to cover all of its use
cases, I guess (CV, speech recognition, ...).

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hestefisk
Disappointed 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!

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roymurdock
Show 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.

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Qasaur
>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?

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tome
"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".

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xikrib
Wow that's pretty sad

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AndrewKemendo
I 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.

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abhisuri97
I think this is done to death in any intro to ML/AI class (at least speaking
from an undergrad perspective).

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AndrewKemendo
I 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.

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minimaxir
The normal computer science curriculum at Carnegie Mellon is already more
difficult than real-world AI applications.

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the_greyd
Top post on HN year 2030: DeepMind's AlphaAI has graduated with B.S in AI, and
has gained consciousness.

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bcaa7f3a8bbc
And since the AI knows how to design an AI system, it underwent an
intelligence explosion and turned out of control...

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rland
It'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)

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szilardboy
Eventually 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.

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tomxor
Then again for a robot, living in silicon valley is a perfect fit... they only
need a cupboard, no bathroom or working kitchen.

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abhisuri97
Yay 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.

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zitterbewegung
I 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?

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mmirate
It is, and it's still very much a fluff class.

Such is its proper place, unless and until CS becomes a profession.

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brianorwhatever
I'd argue we need a lot more ethics training in computer science professions

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mmirate
Without 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_.

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atgreen
This 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.

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marsrover
Pretty 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.

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autokad
I kind of have a problem with an BS in AI. the degree itself proves no edge
over a BS in com sci / stats / etc. when applying for graduate programs, and
there are very few positions in the field that would hire someone that was not
a masters or PHD. However the same BS in AI isn't as applicable to other said
undergrad majors.

seems like someone would be limiting their options for little gains.

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rococode
I wonder if it's a matter of time? Right now people only hire for masters or
PhD, but perhaps that's because most CS bachelor's don't give a sufficient
understanding of AI/ML for those jobs. As more AI-specific programs are
developed by reputable CS schools such as CMU we may see that change and
employers be more willing to accept BS degrees.

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noetic_techy
I'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.

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doppp
The discussion posted here 4 months ago is worth a look:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17040368](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17040368)

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PeterStuer
When 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)

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conbandit
Really 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.

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barry-cotter
Ethicists 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-
mor...](https://talkingethics.com/2013/11/25/why-arent-ethicists-more-
ethical/)

• 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
Fluency 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.

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sytelus
So 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 :).

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msie
I 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.

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kirkules
Yeah, I originally thought this link was going to be about BS people say when
they think they're talking about AI.

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tempodox
I 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.

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lowkeyokay
Definitely misread that title...

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biggio
Is Airtificial Intelligence a science?

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PeterStuer
It 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'.

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mehh
Not 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?

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clu1590
I would have loved to take this curriculum. Too bad CMU is probably one of the
few programs properly equipped for an AI major.

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f137
Well, this BS abbreviation is amusing.

Really, I'd love to have a look at a good bu..s..t in AI reading list :)

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teekert
Ok, 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.)

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dragonwriter
“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.

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sdrothrock
BS 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.

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amingilani
I read that as "BS in AI curriculum" \-- boy, did this not turn out to be what
I had expected.

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kimburgess
Came here for the same. Unfortunate naming, but accurate for large swathes of
the field.

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imleft
Bs is right.

