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Artificial Intelligence - a new major

Starting with the new academic year 2022/2023, the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) will launch a new course of study - Artificial Intelligence. According to Prof. Piotr Kulicki from the Department of the Foundations of Computer Science at KUL classes will focus on practical programming skills related to artificial intelligence applications. The university is currently hosting the National Cognitive Science Conference entitled "Time for Mind 4.0 Artificial Intelligence."

 

The new Artificial Intelligence degree program, which will be open to 36 students starting in October 2022, is designed to prepare students for careers as programmers and specialists in designing intelligent systems, as well as in evaluating their usefulness.

 

This is related, on the one hand, to the research we conduct at our university, and on the other hand, to the needs of the job market - not only in Poland, but all over the world,” - Prof. Piotr Kulicki said. He also stressed that these courses, in addition to obtaining theoretical knowledge, offer work experience in IT companies (KUL researchers cooperate, among others, with MakoLab digital agency) or in institutions related to the design and implementation of advanced technologies.

 

Studying Artificial Intelligence will give you very specific professional competencies that will enable you to, among other things, create simple and complex computer programs to solve problems related to AI (Artificial Intelligence), as well as analytical and IT competencies such as programming in Python scripting language and R language. It is also an opportunity to acquire skills in using specialized programming tools in the areas of - as stated by the founders of the major - reasoning automation, knowledge representation, machine learning and natural language processing.

 

"When trying to define what artificial intelligence is, or rather what it is supposed to be, it is necessary to point to a completely new entity in our reality. And it is not about an entity known in mass culture, which would prove dangerous to humans, but about artificial intelligence related to its practical application" - Prof. Kulicki stressed, reminding that artificial intelligence is supposed to help people solve very specific problems.

 

"Let me illustrate this with the example of very useful medical diagnostics. Even today, on the basis of collected information about the patient, a computer program is able to make a diagnosis, which in most cases turns out to be better than what a specialist physician - who has the same information as the computer - will predict. Currently, it works in such a way that the doctor uses a computer program, which gives him a specific suggestion for consideration, and this is still verified by a human - but we see that statistically this computer suggestion many times turns out to be better than the human suggestion" - explained the researcher.

 

 

"What is interesting about this understanding of artificial intelligence, the mechanism which the students of KUL will explore, is the kind of program which is capable of learning on its own. So it's not that the experts put their knowledge into the computer and that makes it better than each individual expert. No, there is learning going on here. And this learning can take place, for example, through reinforcement, that is, the system has to perform certain tasks and when it performs worse it receives information about it and improves itself - it receives similar feedback when it does something better. It can be illustrated by, for example, two computer programs playing chess against each other and after playing a million games they are able to play so well that they can beat any human being, even a chess grandmaster" - added Prof. Kulicki.

 

The scientist also reminded that the concept of artificial intelligence present in science fiction literature for many years, including in films of this genre, is often combined with the fear that it will prove dangerous to humans. "That's because our experience shows that if machines get down to something, sooner or later they win over humans. This is, for example, the game of chess, more recently the go game - we see that these programs can definitely process the information faster, they can also remember more information and are better at picking up correlations in large amounts of data that a human would not notice. However, this kind of concern is over the top because the current advantage of these computer programs is only episodic. Certainly, today there is no threat coming from machines that would be able to function like a human being" - he reassured.

 

However, graduates of KUL with a major in artificial intelligence are not only expected to have practical programming skills, but are to be prepared to shape policy in this area, e.g. in companies or in government administration. "What is important, these studies will certainly be very interesting as they will combine knowledge not only from computer science, but also from philosophy, psychology or the recently popular cognitive science". - concluded Prof. Kulicki.

 

To a large extent, an AI degree will be similar to a more traditional computer science degree. Speaking of the differences, Prof. Kulicki pointed out that the emphasis in practical programming skills will be put on intelligent applications. "Programming at our university is more focused on using tools like neural networks in, for example, natural language processing, image recognition, machine learning. In addition, artificial intelligence studies will devote less time to hardware or networking issues and more time to the socio-humanistic aspects of creating and implementing advanced technologies and the predictability of computer program operation," - he added.



More information about the new major, including admission criteria, is available on the KUL website dedicated for college applicants. -https://kandydat.kul.pl/strona-glowna/studia-i-stopnia/sztuczna-inteligencja

We also recommend our website dedicated to the major: ai.kul.pl.

 

It is also worth listening to the lectures from a two-day conference broadcast on the Tv KUL channel on You Tube entitled "Czas na umysł 4.0. Sztuczna inteligentigencja"; on Thursday, Robert Trypuz, PhD, professor of the Catholic University of Lublin, talked about what kind of artificial intelligence we can be afraid of, whereas the topic of the emotional face of artificial intelligence was presented by Professor Krystyna Rymarczyk of the Social-Humanist University SWPS in Warsaw.