[gradys]

That's much of the math behind AI, but there's much more to building real things with it. It's a cross-disciplinary field touching:

- Math, as you say

- Software engineering, especially data engineering

- Design - since the the math and engineering enable new kinds of problems to be solved by computers, there's a lot of unexplored design territory

- The domains of all the input and output modalities it touches, like linguistics, computer vision, etc.

- Increasingly, ethics

Sure, each of these topics are already covered by existing university departments, but the boundaries between departments are arbitrary and often limiting anyway. Why not establish a new locus that brings much of the above under one physical and administrative roof?

[gajjanag]

The funny thing is that MIT already has something called "MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society" (IDSS): https://idss.mit.edu/

I wonder how this is going to play with the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and what each entity will choose to focus on.

[rasmi]

>It is expected that the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and the MIT Quest for Intelligence will all become part of the new College; other units may join the College.

http://news.mit.edu/2018/faq-mit-stephen-schwarzman-college-...

[Puer]

I agree. I hope that M.I.T. is able to consolidate these domains in a cohesive manner. The mathematics of ML is super unfriendly because it borrows from so many inter-related domains. You'll end up with notation that uses sigma to represent both summation and covariance within a single expression, or inconsistencies with whether vectors are column vectors by default or row vectors. It makes your understanding of the material dependent on whether you had the same background as the author.

[Koshkin]

In mathematics, good and consistent notation does help learning stuff; but I noticed that it can also have some sort of "parasitic" effect and interfere with the true understanding of things, and so I find it useful to try and see if I can understand something given a less elaborate notation (or without one at all).

In general, one has to remember that mathematical notation was invented to make calculations (on paper) more efficient and not with the goal of making it easier to understand things.