This fall, Illinois Institute of Technology students will be among the first in the nation to have the option of pursuing an undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence.
“AI is the future. We want to train a workforce that can meet the challenges and opportunities of the future, which includes artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Aron Culotta, associate professor of computer science and director of Illinois Tech. Bachelor of Science Program in Artificial Intelligence.
Historically, artificial intelligence has been taught at the graduate level because it was more of a research area than a core component of computer science. But as the field has matured, Illinois Tech decided it was time to offer an undergraduate degree.
“We thought it was time to bring some of these lessons and concepts to the undergraduate level so that when they graduate they have both the traditional computational and design aspects and a good understanding of some of these AI approaches,” he said. Culottes.
Graduates will be ready to work in many fields, including technology, medicine, finance, robotics, business intelligence, law and insurance.
A key element of the program will be to give students a thorough grounding in ethics. While many science fiction films have explored the dangers of artificial intelligence turning against its creators, from Fritz Lang's “Metropolis” to Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Culotta said these threats are “quite excessive”.
“There are a lot of things we need to worry about before we worry about robots turning on us,” he said.
One issue that has been discussed very recently in the field, he says, is that of bias and fairness.
“So if I have an AI that's trying to predict recurrence — the thing about machine learning is that you train (the AI) on historical data,” Culotta said. “And that tends to lead to scenarios where algorithms either reproduce existing biases or maybe make them worse just by the nature of how they work.
Because of this, Culotta said it's important to instill in students the importance of transparency in their work and to create artificial intelligence that can explain its reasoning to humans.
“To gain people's trust, we need to create algorithms that will report to people and describe, 'This is the decision I'm making and this is why,'” Culotta said. “And then man can evaluate not only the decision, but also the reasoning to be able to make sure that the reasoning is valid in its context.”
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