Students Get an Intro to AI in First AI Major Class at UC San Diego

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• Katherine Connor - [email protected]

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More than 100 undergraduate students enrolled in the University of California San Diego's new artificial intelligence major took their first major-specific course, CSE 25: Intro to AI, over winter quarter. The class aims to introduce AI principles that the students will see repeatedly over the next four years, and level the playing field between students who may have taken AI coursework on their own, and students for whom this is all new material.

UC San Diego's undergraduate AI major - the result of more than a decade of growth in AI teaching and research on campus - is designed to prepare computer science students to build the next generation of AI systems, improve the foundations of the AI systems currently in use, and engage students with the ethical questions surrounding these systems and their impact on society.

The AI major resides within the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, with connections across the entire campus, including other academic departments within the Jacobs School of Engineering and with the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing.

In this first major-specific course, students gained an understanding of what AI is, and experienced the end-to-end AI pipeline from problem formulation and data gathering to modeling, training, evaluation and deployment. In the hands-on, project-based course, students learned about different ways to train AI models; applied programming tools to interact with AI models; and evaluated the societal and ethical implications of AI. They saw the core ideas of AI in the context of realistic applications, building small systems from scratch to experience the design challenges and mathematical foundations of model design, parameter turning and evaluation.

"The idea is that over the course of the AI major students will see these topics again and again at different levels of depth," said Trevor Bonjour, a UC San Diego computer science teaching professor who taught CSE 25 and is one of the lead faculty in the AI program. "Learning happens with repetition, so for this Intro to AI course we wanted to ensure that all students were exposed to foundational concepts in modern AI systems, including neural networks, that they can build on in future classes."

Over the course of 10 weeks, students explore supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning paradigms, ranging from classical linear models such as perceptrons, to neural networks, language models, and Q-learning agents. The class introduced students to key mathematical tools in AI such as probability, linear algebra, and multivariable calculus. Embedded throughout the course are explorations of how bias shows up in the data and deployment of these models.

Bonjour said he was surprised to learn that roughly a quarter of the students had already taken an AI class before, as a summer course or in their high school. The course's final project - working in a small group to build an AI agent - was designed in such a way that students who did come in with previous experience could develop more advanced AI projects, while students learning these concepts for the first time could work with the scaffolding provided over the quarter to create their own agent. For example, students created an AI agent that could provide a caption for a given image; detect pedestrians in video footage; and teach a computer to play a game like Blackjack.

"Most machine learning courses in CSE are offered at the upper-division level, so most students come in with very different levels of exposure," said Eric Song, a UC San Diego computer science graduate student and teaching assistant for this Intro to AI course. "Our goal is to introduce these concepts earlier so that every student at least has some familiarity going in."

For the final project, students submitted a project report in the format of a conference paper. Bonjour said this was also meant to familiarize all students with how computer science and AI research papers are organized, since there is so much research happening in AI and ML right now that students may choose to contribute to in the future.

This Intro to AI course is being taught again in spring quarter for the remainder of the AI major students. It is being taught by Mia Minnes, a teaching professor of computer science, Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education within the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and another lead faculty in the AI major.

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in: Artificial Intelligence