As artificial intelligence learns more about us, CU Boulder students will be learning about AI in one of the first dedicated master’s degree program to the field set to start this fall.
CBS
Teaching a course about something that’s changing just about as fast as you can create assignments isn’t exactly easy, but a handful of schools across the country are doing just that. And the courses, along with AI itself, all stem from network engineering, a field that’s exploding across the country and filling classrooms at the university.
If you open up ChatGPT, you can ask just about anything, but there’s also some clear concerns with the tool around deepfakes, misinformation and environmental concern. All of it will be covered under Bobby Schnabel’s new master’s degree courses in AI at CU.
“You’ve probably heard that term about whether these systems are going to get smarter than we are, and what will happen with that yet,” Schnabel said.
And while Schnabel might not have that answers, he still knows quite a lot and will teach students how to build and regulate that sci-fi like technology.
“What can you do to have better privacy in getting the data from AI, or how can you avoid the algorithmic bias?” Schnabel said. “When you’re developing a product, you need to think about the ethical implications from the start.”
Schnabel says artificial intelligence itself started from that network engineering in the computers behind the search.
José Santos teaches about how these loud machines work, as CU says its makes up the biggest university lab of its kind in the country.
“In the lab, you’re going to see several hundred devices that are basically used to train our students,” Santos said. “We need a balance between theoretical knowledge, the principles of how things work, along with the implementation, the deployment.”
The demand to learn how this works is skyrocketing.
The online platform CU Boulder will use for the first semester of AI courses online, Coursera, reports three million students enrolling in AI related courses last year, estimated to be just about six students per minute.
“That’s the beauty of this discipline over the years,” Santos said. “We have become faster and better, but we still follow very established rules about how to interconnect a user to the rest of the world.”
It’s something students say they are already learning in fields ranging from online software engineering to the military.
This fall, CU expects dozens of students like them to focus their learning on machine learning. Applications are expected to open soon with the first online program starting this fall and on campus program starting next year.
“The entire history of computer science, it’s a field where courses have to change every year, and it’s both the fun of it and the challenge of it,” Schnabel said.
