At the University of Pennsylvania, undergraduate students in its engineering department will soon be able to study to earn a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence.
What can you do with an AI degree? University of Pennsylvania says students will be able to apply the skills they learn in school to create responsible artificial intelligence tools, develop materials for emerging chips and hardware, and create AI-based healthcare breakthroughs, including with recent antibiotics.
Generative AI technology, essentially algorithms that can create recent content, is transforming every aspect of life, creating an “urgent need” for AI engineers who understand the principles of AI and can apply them responsibly and ethically, school recorded in a press release.
The bachelor’s degree program offers coursework in topics such as machine learning, computational algorithms, data analysis, and advanced robotics. Subjects to choose from “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” and “Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence” will also appear.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence has raised many concerns about how the technology is being implemented, including a lack of transparency in the development of immense language models, private and personal data used to create artificial intelligence tools, and known Bias problems in algorithmics decision-making. It looks like the show plans to tackle them head-on.
A degree of artificial intelligence allows us to spot signs of a changing labor market
The reality is also that artificial intelligence is changing the job market, and future generations of students will enter the job market full of recent opportunities.
“We are educating students for careers that don’t yet exist, in fields that may be completely recent or revolutionized by the time they graduate,” Robert Ghrist, associate dean for undergraduate education at Penn Engineering, said in a statement.
At the same time, AI talent is uncommon. Workers with AI skills earn high salaries: OpenAI engineers, for example, apparently earn over $800,000.
The University of Pennsylvania’s AI bachelor’s degree program will begin this fall. It’s also not the only university in the US that has an artificial intelligence program for students. Carnegie Mellon AND Purdue University they also offer bachelor’s degrees in artificial intelligence.