[eli_gottlieb]

>Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely.

Depends which departments/courses they're assimilating. Course 6 is computer science that holds CSAIL, course 9 is Brain and Cognitive Sciences that holds cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. CBMM encompasses everything from probabilistic programming to deep neural nets to classical computer vision.

I think that if they take some of the more exciting but empirically rooted stuff from CBMM and build up a department that can actually train students for it in-depth, that will be a significant improvement in training tracks available to people now. Computational neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience, computational cognitive science, machine learning, statistical learning theory, etc all remain small specialties within larger fields when taken alone, but when put together really deserve to have their connections considered as potentially forming the foundations for a single field.