Someday you might have a significant relationship with your toaster. With a few silicon chips and the right programming, it’ll use its considerable downtime to compose original musical interludes to play while your English muffin is browning. It’ll text you Haikus designed to make you smile:
Toasting your bagel brings light to my elements And warmth to my heart.
This change won’t happen by itself. Students are working hard to master the art and science of designing machines that learn, make decisions, create, think. Starting this fall, the Illinois Institute of Technology — in recent years branding itself as the more brawny “Illinois Tech” — became the only college in the Midwest to offer an undergraduate major in artificial intelligence, creating the systems that will guide everything from robots to trucks to medical care.
”Traditionally, AI would be taught at the graduate level, because it’s a research degree,” said Aron Culotta, director of IIT’s bachelor of science in artificial intelligence program. “Occasionally, you’ll see it as a specialization inside of a computer science degree. But really it’s matured a lot in the past 10 years. We feel like a lot of the core principles can be taught at the undergraduate level.”
The change was announced last spring after admission deadlines, so new students haven’t yet enrolled as AI majors. But 10 of the school’s 500 computer science students shifted to AI. One of them is Devyani Gauri, 20.
”I’m interested in deep learning and neural networks,” she said. “Deep learning is something that uses huge amounts of data and also uses neural networks — artificial networks based off how animals’ brains work, using that pattern to solve problems quickly.”
Unlike computer science majors, AI majors are required to have a minor, reflecting the tendency to apply artificial intelligence to specific fields, such as transportation. Gauri’s non-computer passion is music — one reason she came to IIT from India.
”The VanderCook College of Music made me more prone to come here,” she said. “I can do AI and music; they both intersect really well.”
AI is often viewed through science fiction as computers taking over humanity.
”The existential threat is wildly overblown,” Culotta said. “In science fiction and movies, the robots are always way better than they are in the real world.”
That’s the good news; the bad news is we’re worrying about the wrong thing.
”The fear has almost always [been shown] by Hollywood that this physical danger is robots,” said Mustafa Bilgic, co-director of the AI undergraduate program. “The real danger is happening right now. In some authoritative regimes, they are using face recognition technology to oppress groups of people. These dangers in bias and fairness and privacy are immediate dangers.”
AI is moving from addressing relatively simple, rule-based problems — like computer chess — to situations of complex ambiguity.
”AI has ventured into how to make decisions when you’re not 100 percent sure,” Bilgic said. “With self-driving cars, there are multiple utilities: It needs to be safe. It needs to be fast. You cannot just go 4 mph. It needs to obey the laws. It needs to be comfortable. It needs to be cheap. It needs to be understandable. There are so many aspects you have to maximize.”
The impression is that AI systems are trying to mimic people — the classic Turing test. But often today the human models are brushed aside.
“They didn’t build self-driving cars by looking at somebody driving and trying to copy it,” Culotta said. “Airplanes don’t flap their wings.”
What’s the different between computer science and artificial intelligence?
”Computer science looks at things that already exist, tries to make it a little better: maybe a little faster, with a little more memory,” Gauri said. “For AI, it’s uncharted territory. It’s things you haven’t thought of before. When most people think of AI, they usually think first thing of self-driving cars. There’s a lot more to AI. I read that AI might be the new electricity.”
Gauri said she wants to go into research and get her Ph.D. Asked if she would do that at IIT, her answer illustrated just how fast things are moving, both in the field and at Illinois Tech.
”IIT does not have a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, but who knows?” she said. “Maybe by the time I graduate they will. I have three more semesters, so maybe they’ll introduce a Ph.D. program soon.”
