MIT Doubles Down on Artificial Intelligence

MIT Doubles Down on Artificial Intelligence

Because of the technological wave of Artificial Intelligence, also known as A.I., courses, conferences, and joint majors that have to do with A.I. have vastly increased in the last few years. In light of these developments, M.I.T. has decided to create a new university funded by a $1 billion investment. M.I.T. says that, so far, it has raised around two-thirds of the necessary funds. The largest donor is the C.E.O. of Blackstone Group, Stephen A. Schwarzman, who donated $350 million. The new university will be named the M.I.T. Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, and will create fifty new jobs for faculty and many more fellowships for graduate students. The new college is planned to begin in the fall of 2019, although it will not have its own space until 2022. The goal of the new college is to teach computing technologies to people with backgrounds in fields such as lab sciences, politics, history, and language. The president of M.I.T., L. Rafael Reif, calls these people “Bilinguals.”

Mr. Reif stated that, “to educate bilinguals, we have to create a new structure.” Mr. Reif also stated that academic departments tend to work by themselves, in spite of programs that are interdisciplinary. Mr. Reif says this because departments tend to have power over who is hired and achieves tenure at universities. Due to this, people who apply A.I. tools to their field are often seen as too computer science oriented by their department and too interested iwn their own field by the computer science department. M.I.T’s new college plans to fix this issue and allow more people to learn about A.I. and use it in their field.

Written by Lorrenzo Lizzeri & Edited by Alexander Fleiss