TheVORTEX

As I mentioned before, I signed up for the 160,000-student online Introduction Artificial Intelligence by Stanford illuminati Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. I audited by watching all the videos and doing the little online quizzes. Others did all the homework, took the tests, and wrote code to go with the lessons. Waaay beyond my ancient math skills. One thing I learned is that AI is all about probabilities and algorithms to calculate them for anything in the world you can measure.

Why I bring this up again is that I see where MIT—which has had a lot of packaged courseware online free to the world for a long time—just launched a new program called MITx. MITx is online courses where video lessons, quizzes, material and grading all done automatically. It’s free, worldwide and anybody can sign up. The first class is Circuits and Electronics and it starts March 5.

Is it a coincidence that MIT came out with a competing free online system? I think not. Sanford and MIT are arguably the top two engineering schools in the country. They are in heated competition of have the best “brand” for engineering and innovation. So, bang!, just like that, here’s MIT with outreach worldwide for the leadership title. It harks back to the way Stanford and MIT competed in the 2007 DARA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles. Stanford’s AI team under Thrun kicked MIT’s butt.

But there’s another reason to set up these courses. In December last year, not long after the AI course was over, I saw on YouTube a discussion session between Sebastian Thrun and some people at a Singularity University seminar. In the session Thrun said something that hit me between the eyes. He said after the final exam they had ranked all the students that completed the course and found something like 2,000 students that had nearly perfect scores. Over 200 had perfect scores; not one of them was a Stanford engineering student. Most were not in the United States. (Don’t quote me on the exact numbers. I’ve looked high and low on YouTube and can’t find the video I saw to double-check. No luck.)

Given the poor performance of American students in science and math in many international standardized tests this wasn’t exactly earth-shaking. But what got me was that Stanford engineering and his team had a list of many of the best and brightest people in the world in math and programming! That is like being the only pro basketball scout in the country to have ever seen the top scoring college players in the country. What’s a list like that worth? To the Stanford engineering department? To recruiters at Google, Apple and other Silicon Valley tech firms? The AI course turned into a fantastic screening tool to find and potentially recruit the next generation of top engineers, scientists, and programmers. I can’t be the only person to think of that. The folks at MIT must have slapped their foreheads hearing that like I did.

The latest shoe to drop: Sebastian Thrun is leaving this job as tenured director of the Stanford AI program to join a startup called Udacity where he’ll be teaching an online worldwide course: CS373 Programming a Robotic Car. (Watch out! Next time I take my ‘99 Civic out for a spin I may be sitting in the back seat.)

Thrun as expressed interest in innovating in mass education, but is that the only reason to take a left turn in his career? I mean, he’s the rock-star of AI. I suspect that he and Stanford had some sort of parting of ways. Free mass education may not have been the University’s idea of how to conduct a 100+ year-old university.

So the Introduction to AI class online has started. The final enrollment is somewhere over 160,000 class members. (Well, we all know that the attrition from class is terrible in the first couple of weeks.) 

But, this is being touted as the biggest online teaching event ever. There are students from more than 190 countries. That’s spanning the globe for sure. A lot of university class material and lectures have been online for years now, but running a real-time class of this magnitude is, I guess, a first. 

So is this a preamble to a whole new or emerging way of learning? One enthusiast has likened this event to the “butterfly-effect“ notion of chaos theory and expects a sudden revolutionary change. I don’t think I’d go that far. One of the problems of AI over the past half-century has been too much hyperbole about the imminent arrival of super-intelligent machines. These failed forecasts have caused credibility problems for the field.

One thing I hope does happen: I hope the fact that over 160,000 people worldwide are paying attention to artificial intelligence reaches the awareness of the public and of clueless politicians in the US and elsewhere. The advent of desktop computers caused a real if unheralded revolution in jobs and needed job skills over the past 30 years. AI and robotics will mean an enormous need for people who expect to enjoy a level of prosperity to get out ahead of this trend and then run like hell to maintain their marketability. 

One of the things that most interests me about the Intro to AI course going on around the world with 145,000! students are the parallels between the intelligence that computer scientists engineer (what this course is about) and intelligence in biology (what Mother Nature has been evolving for billions of years). I’ve already mentioned that the course instructors, Sebastian Thun and Peter Norvig, aren’t wasting time with definitions of intelligence or with biology; they’re plunging straight ahead with things to do with computers like searching or driving a car. Still, I can’t help being fascinated with how intelligence manifest and is used in nature. Moreover, how close are the engineered intelligent processes to the intelligence honed by a few billion years of evolution — our own? Is the sovereign about to be dethroned? Should we at least be looking over our shoulders?

The starting point for the simplest ideas in AI is presented as a little diagram called the “perception/action cycle”.  It means that to have any intelligence a thing has to get environmental information through its sensors, process that information and turn it into action in its environment. That’s both basic to engineered devices of any value, and to any living thing. Even single cell organisms get environmental impacts and react to them in some way. It may just mean quietly oozing away.

The critical thing, the “intelligence”, lies in transforming information is some form into an action within a repertoire. That process is the red arrow pointing down in the box in this diagram. For both machines and living entities that arrow becomes enormously complex. The fun of the course — at least for me — is finding and comparing the analogous processes between protoplasm and machine.

The Stanford Introduction to AI class has started ( @aiclass ). It’s a little like the first DARPA self-driving car competition: it’s got a few glitches in login, and access to the class videos. But that’s the first lesson of AI: do something, fix the problems and repeat…over and over.

It’s interesting that Thrun and Norvig haven’t bothered to try to define artificial intelligence. They consider search engines, medical diagnostic programs, chess, robots, video game engines and other things to be artificial intelligence. The field of AI is full of ongoing debates about just what “intelligence” is. From the perspective of neurobiologists or philosophers a lot of what they call AI is not intelligence. But we could spend the whole course debating these things. The instructors’ approach seems to be: if a computer can do something useful on its own, it’s AI. I don’t know whether or not they’ll tackle the definition later; in the meantime I’m sure we students will debate these issues endlessly in online forums. 

Additionally, there’s meta-meaning to the AI course. Intro to AI is also perhaps the biggest online class ever (~140,000 enrolees), worldwide, and free. It’s like some global rock concert for peace. There definitely an innovative purpose in taking this cutting-edge topic to the world stage complete with all the social media trappings. Might it kick-off other such learning events? We’ll wait and see.

Boy I’ve got the back-to-school butterflies. Where’s my classroom? Who’s in my class? Should I sit at the front or back or near a cute girl?

None of that applies because I just enrolled in Stanford Engineering’s free, online Intro to AI class. It’s gotten media attention because ~100,000 people worldwide have reportedly enrolled. I guess I’m 100,001. 

There are several reason this is so popular:

• The guys presenting it are true Rock Stars of the AI world: Sebastian Thrun, head of the team that won the DARPA self-guided vehicle challenge and is behind Google’s self-driving car, and Peter Norvig, Dir of Research at Google. They’re not just academics but have real results in AI.
• It’s free!
• Worldwide this seems to be “an idea whose time has come.” It’d be fascinating to know where we’re all from (no figures yet), but there’s definitely global interest from people who are keeping an eye on the future.

As I’ve said, I’m a skeptic about the singularitarian notion of human-transcending AI, but I’d like to get the views of real innovators. We’ll see what happens.