Well.. it is nice, I guess, but really dumbed down version in my opinion to actually be of practical use. Sure it's great publicity for Reaktor and Finland and whatnot, but I'm dubious of its actual benefits. Teaching basic statistics would be much more useful than "AI", but I guess it lacks the hype factor so marketing-wise it wouldn't just be as cool.
It's as if there wasn't enough of snake oil salesman promoting their business as "AI-powered" already. And what AI does even mean in current context? A bag of machine learning algorithms? I always likened AI to be more of general AI rather than how it's nowadays labelled.
being AI is a way for ML startups to get triple the seed capital. Nothing more.
I would argue against this course having no benefits. There is a huge disconnect between what the reality of the near-future in tech is and what the media mis-represent it to be, often fuelled by interviews and quotes from the people directly benefiting from stoking the fire.
The general populace being much closer to a position to understand that it's actually largely unrealistic or nonsense is the right way to go about bridging the gap between the "tech class" and your average lay person.
I definitely agree that society in general would be better if people had better grasp of statistics and how they are manipulated and mis-represented to them, but there are so many interest areas that people would be better off for having some understanding of that I don't think any one can be discredited just because it's not one of the others.
The hype factor has always been used to teach people things that they otherwise find boring. So, if that is what is need to get people on board of the AI.., ahem, statistics train, then it's fine with me.
I don't disagree with you, except for the part about actual benefits, it might be true for the general "hacker news crowd", but anything that makes people understand statistics slightly better is good in my book.
If it takes hype, advertising and buzz-words to do that, I'm ok with that.
The work done by them has been incredible. Their course on OO with Java was a lifesaver as a student, helping me with a lot of concepts and filling the gaps, to start working as a SE.
While I didn't have the time to complete it, their fullstack course seems also very good, has someone completed it that can share their experience?.
The basic programming course I & II in University of Helsinki were in my opinion the best courses of the whole CS degree. And by "them" I think you are referring to the people who made that particular course, the folks at RAGE research group, led by Arto Hellas and Matti Luukkainen :). Great people, and really done great things for the quality of CS education in I'd say Finland in general.
Haven't done the full-stack course but it seemed ok, it irks me a little bit that it's still in JavaScript but oh well, you can't have it all.
Registration page doesn't ask you for official credentials and the country selection menu has all of the countries. Educating 1% of European population is just a personal goal.
The comments here are surprisingly negative. So many wet blankets, from people saying the offering sucks to people mistakenly complaining about it being EU-only to someone saying it empowers just white europe.
I wonder how many people criticizing it even planned on trying this completely-free course.
I think we really need to work on pulling the plug on this fetishization of contrarianism as a community.
Its Finnish EU PRESIDENCY, which means it's paid by the EU budget.
Each EU country holds the rotating EU presidency for six months, which means they chair interministerial meetings, formally negotiate and propose compromise legal texts, etc. In this role the presidency receives a budget for promotional events, communication efforts, etc. The Finnish presidency decided to use part of the budget for this translation effort.
This seems to fit various EU goals well, eg to upskill the population, promote digital competences and encourage use of all 24 EU languages. Think of just the added value of having common terminology and definitions.
Quote from the press release:
The cost of the initiative, a total of 1 679 000 euros, will be funded from the budget of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland.
The course was developed quite some time ago by the University of Helsinki with their funds. It's a public university like all Finnish universities, meaning it is funded by taxes.
What's news here is the translation job to translate it to multiple European languages. It takes an additional 1,7 million € and is funded solely by the Ministry of Employment and the Economy of Finland.
I failed to find any claims of EU funding any part of the original development or this translation job. The Finnish Ministry of Employment calls this course a gift from Finland to the European Union. What's your source on this being EU funded?
Apologies I realise the start of my comment is a bit harsh. I do find out really frustrating to see people many up facts and half-truths as they go along.
At least the language dropdown seems to be intelligable in all languages.
Compared to getting stuck in google maps in, say, Russia, where even the 'change language' menu item is in Russian, so of course you can't even find it to change to English unless you can read Russian, or happen to know where itt is already.
I think it's actually detrimental. You will lose opportunities if you stick with any language but English for programming related things. Your translations won't be perfect. You won't be able to communicate with people in other countries. You will miss new important developments and discussion all of it happening in English. It's just much more efficient for everyone to swallow the pride and accept English as the language of programming/computer science.
I am not a native English speaker. I am not very talented when it comes to learning languages. It took me many years to be able to understand written and spoken English. Still I am very grateful that once I got there the whole world is open to me. I can read every important publication, participate in discussions and read code other people write. Doing it in my native language is just putting artificial barriers out there. It doesn't make sense. Learning about computer science in my native language just makes it less efficient and introduce problems like quality of the translation or terms lacking necessary context and usage patterns (as there is less published in that language).
I feel efforts to translate to other European languages will be detrimental to general level of education and communication in future businesses. Publish only in English, it forces people to learn it. It's better for everyone in the end. If you know you had to learn it to be a competent programmer or scientist or other IT specialist you will and by doing so you will contribute to removing barriers that exist in EU which Americans don't have to deal with. I believe it's one of the big advantages US IT sector has over Europeans.
Why?
Sure, it would be nice with more languages, but if someone from germany/france/spain want's to learn study AI, isn't it probable that they are used to reading english anyway?
You would think that, but I've seen Germans with a PhD that don't speak English. Once a language is large enough, most things get translated into that language (as there is a market for it). Anyway, German and French are large enough, Dutch isn't.
Seriously, I do not want to read German or French source code. Please write all your code and documentation in English.
And while you are at it, why not read the material in English in the first place? That way you are using the correct terminology.
My mother tongue is Dutch, and all my systems run in English. The silly words people come up with translating things to their own language is weird and confusing. I remember Excel having Dutch translations for their functions. WTF!?!?! Try to guess the Dutch version of things you already know.
You are working in the technology industry, learn English! (not directed at the above poster :))
do they only collaborate with people from their own university?
What about the tools that they use? do you get german translations for all those popular python-libraries?
How do you handle scientific papers? are those also translated, or do you only look at german research at german univiersities?
I would think that it would be pretty non-controversial to say that english is the lingua-franca of science today.
With that said, I could argue against myself in saying that it's nice of elementsofai to use as many languages as possible since this might be of use to people who are still far from university-level.
I've never encountered a single AI or CS paper translated to or written in German. You may not need to speak English for a PhD in, say, law, but you can't be a competent computer scientist only knowing German.
This title has been misleadingly edited, removing a crucial word.
In the linked article, it states that the course will be available "in all official EU languages", which is indeed the case. The word "official" has been removed from the title, thus giving a very different indication of the actual set of languages in question.
Can we change the title to soon free for all or soon available in all EU languages? As you can tell from the comments here the title is unnecessarily divisive and doesn't seen to jive with what the website says or the Finnish governments intentions:
Quote from website:
"The Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU has decided to invest in people’s future skills and will make the Elements of AI online course freely available in all official EU languages."
I wonder if there is a rationale for this particularly strange selection of languages. They propose, for example, Irish (Gaelic), which is the native language of about 80.000 european citizens and is understood by about a million. Yet they do not propose Catalan, which is the native language of 4.1 million and understood by about ten million.
As a staunch partisan for the unity of the EU, and native Catalan speaker, I cannot but feel dismay about this continuous lack of tact from my institutions. I know this is due to ignorance more than malice, but it really looks as if the institutions are purposely shadowing our very existence.
I think they're just going with the list of official EU languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...). That list does not, unfortunately, include Catalan, even though the Spanish government pushed for adding it to the list (along with Galician and Basque).
The press release[1] has contact information for several people involved with the project. Perhaps you could offer to translate the course into Catalan. It doesn't hurt to ask. If you feel really strongly it should be offered in your native language you could also just do the entire translation and then contact them. Once you've put in all the effort it will be much harder for them to say thanks but no thanks.
Ok, I can understand that it sucks that your language is excluded, but I think it would make way more sense to try to get your language recognized as an official eu language instead of critizising a finnish project for limiting their selection to official eu languages.
With that said, if catalan was added, would you actually use that instead of english for a course like this?
> it would make way more sense to try to get your language recognized as an official eu language instead of critizising a finnish project for limiting their selection to official eu languages
I agree 100% with this. My intention is not to criticize the organizers of this course that made a very reasonable choice. The problem here is the rather absurdl (in my view) selection of official EU language. It would make more sense to me to declare English the sole official language of the union. This would not favor any big country now that the UK is out.
> With that said, if catalan was added, would you actually use that instead of english for a course like this?
Of course! I use all my software localized into catalan, even vim! Now, for technical documentation it is rare to find much in my language, almost everything is in english only. If this (quite serious) course was translated I would be even happier to follow it (but I might do it anyway if it was english only, as I'm used to it).
This is the list of official EU languages, to which Irish (Gaelic) belongs, but not Catalan. Reading the article carefully reveals that they propose the course precisely in the official EU languages.
Not every national language of EU member states is an EU official language. Luxembourgish and Turkish are national languages of Luxembourg and Cyprus respectively but are not EU official languages.
EU official languages are specified by the EU treaties. In cases of enlargement, they are negotiated between the EU and the acceding state. When Cyprus joined the EU, Cyprus and the EU agreed that Turkish would not be added to the list of EU official languages.
(Also, the fact that Turkish is a minority language in BiH is of little relevance. BiH is not an EU member state, and most minority languages of EU member states are not EU official languages either.)
Country and language in a single drop-down menu, because in 2020 it's improbable that people born outside of a country speak any other language than their native tongue. Right?
If you were born in Hungary and live in Ireland, but want to access the course content in German as standardized in Luxembourg, you select "German (Luxembourg)". The country only serves to disambiguate multiple variants of the same language.
That's not the way I read it, but it did take a while to get to that point. It appears as if the course has already launched in four languages, and the drop-down is for requesting regional variations of languages. If you want to take it in the existing languages, you can here: https://www.elementsofai.com/ (which is probably a better link overall).
It’s language and country-specific variants of said language.
What is weirder (but not the first time I have seen it) is that the list of languages is sorted by country name. German comes before Danish and Dutch after Maltese.
It's the EU. You're not a full citizen (in the social sense) until you know the native language of your country of residence. How Czech are you if you can't hear the cabbies ripping you off?
Regardless to what country I was born in and what country I am a citizen of (by the way there are many full citizens who don't speak the language of the country particularly well, there is no such a thing as non-full citizenship, you either are a citizen or you are not) I have never wanted to study in its language (let alone use localized versions of coding-related software which I perceive as utter bullshit), wherever English is available I always choose to study and to interact with a computer in English. I'd never hire an AI/IT engineer who is not good at reading/writing/speaking on the subject in English and I doubt I'm alone in this. Arguably being able to efficiently communicate on the subject in English is even more important than the knowledge of the subject itself as nobody can know everything and be a good developer without being able to google things quickly.
I mean, there's no other language appropriate for working with modern computers (Russian is probably the closest second)[0], but the level of English computer programs require of you, especially cushioned ones like they're exposing to people in this case, tends to be less than native understanding of the language.
[0]: English has a huge advantage because typesetting, typewriting, liberalism, and empire had already greatly simplified the writing system by the time computers were standardizing. It was, from the start of electronic computing, basically trivial to typeset English with simple character series, in a readable form. Anglo typewriting and typesetting conventions were already such that monospaced typewritten ASCII makes decent documents on its own.
It's as if there wasn't enough of snake oil salesman promoting their business as "AI-powered" already. And what AI does even mean in current context? A bag of machine learning algorithms? I always likened AI to be more of general AI rather than how it's nowadays labelled.