Teaming up with Oxford University on Artificial Intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Teaming up with Oxford University on Artificial Intelligence

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59 points__Joker20 comments

I'll be interested to see what impact this has on the overall CS department at Oxford. CS in the UK is growing, but still has a much lower profile than in the States. In Stanford, CS is a well-known (!), popular major whereas here in Oxford, the 2013-14 CS class consists of just 69 people. [1]

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

[1]:http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ugadmissions/how_to_apply/

Maybe Oxford is a little slower to adopt 'fad' majors. Computer science was invented in 1965 at Carnegie Mellon. Only 50 years have passed - Oxford is just noticing this modern field and may come to accept it as a lasting discipline in another 50?

Oxbridge follows the British consensus that values general education more than the specialist fields. If you want the best engineering education in the UK you go to Imperial College.

To those who read this, this statement is completely incorrect. It's actually very interesting how (in general) Britain's degrees are far more specialised from far earlier (than the US), and this is no different for either Oxford or Cambridge. I won't comment on the fanboyism :)

Well, the impression I have is that Oxbridge is for scientist and theoreticians, while Imperial is for the profession studies - engineering and medicine, basically.

I got the generalist thing from here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11136511

I find it really interesting that you say this. My perspective as an American was that it was more the other way around. For example, in my undergrad field (physics), people in the UK seem to take fewer courses outside of physics and closely related fields and have less choice in their courses. My understanding was that people there typically came out with a bit deeper specialized physics knowledge but less generalized education.

Do you happen to have any handy links to where I could read more about the British valuation of general education and how it differs from the American approach?

From Wikipedia:

> The world's first computer science degree program, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science, began at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1953. The first computer science degree program in the United States was formed at Purdue University in 1962.

Well at commencement CM claimed to have invented CS programs. Just sayin.

The Oxford CS department has being expanding like crazy for the last five years or more on the research side.

I'm not sure I'd agree that CS has a low profile within the UK, I think it's had a strong history over the past 70 years or so. And now there seems to be a buzz regarding bringing coding into classrooms at a lower age that will hopefully will boost numbers in the future.

I guess the low number may be as it is taught in a traditional manner with a focus on the theoretical fundamentals rather than on software engineering (although the dept does offer a post-grad part-time Software Engineering course I TA'd for that seemed pretty cool.)

Anyway, this is certainly good news for the department (and congrats to Max too!).

I think it could just be that Oxford specifically has not had a large CS department. The departments at Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Imperial are well known and quite large. Involvement in AI goes back quite a ways too; especially Edinburgh has been prominent in the field (especially in robotics) since the '60s. Essex is also known in robotics.

Aren't Zisserman and Simonyan in the Visual Geometry Group - which is part of Engineering - see http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/people.html.

yep see http://www.eng.ox.ac.uk/about/news/university-of-oxford-team...

A lot of work in computing is actually being done in other departments, for instance I work in Population Health at Oxford and my department is heading up the new Big Data Institute. A lot of work on AI, machine learning, big data, and related fields is being undertaken in bio-medical, physical science and engineering based departments as well as in the CS department itself.

Its nice to see that the world is moving towards AI.

Sky-net Incoming :)

Only a minuscule fraction of people who work with/in AI are doing general artificial intelligence. The rest is really more about making sense of the vast and growing amounts of data our world produces. The non-human intelligences that benefit from this are corporations, not artificial minds. It's actually sad that AGI research is still a fringe idea.

Well, the brain seems to be a collection of a whole lot of fancy algorithms, and the statisticians are making a big contribution here.

Sadly, you are correct. The AGI conference this year was about 84 people total. Growing, but nowhere near where it needs to be.

I am not into the research field of general artifical intelligence. How does the "Human Brain Project" fit into this matter? It seems to me like the EU is directing quite a financial package into the direction of AGI, at least when it comes to understanding human brain activity and functionality.

link: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

The Human Brain Project is a basic science endeavor, it's not directly related to AGI research.

In principle, there are two directions AGI work is going: one is the brain emulation approach, the other is aiming at creating a synthetic mind from scratch. Obviously, this is a spectrum with two extreme ends, but compared to overall AI work being performed by our civilization not a lot of people are working on this at all (which is surprising considering the implications of even a moderate success).

A lot of the brain simulation and mapping projects concern themselves not with running an actual mind on silicon. Instead, they are fundamental science projects with goals like modeling neuronal behavior or helping out in pharmaceutical research. Even the "neuron-like" processors that are starting to come out right now are not intended for AGI.

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