Carnegie Mellon University has a well-earned
reputation as one of the nation’s top schools for computer science. Its
graduates go on to work at big tech companies, startups and research labs
worldwide.
Still, for all its past success, the
department’s faculty is planning a retreat this summer to rethink what the school
should be teaching to adapt to the rapid advancement of generative artificial
intelligence.
The technology has “really shaken computer
science education,” said Thomas Cortina, a professor and an associate dean of
the university’s undergraduate programs.
Computer science, more than any other field
of study, is being challenged by generative AI.
The AI technology behind chatbots such as
ChatGPT, which can write essays and answer questions with humanlike fluency, is
making inroads across academia. But AI is coming fastest and most forcefully to
computer science, which emphasizes writing code, the language of computers.
Big tech companies and startups have
introduced AI assistants that can generate code and are rapidly becoming more
capable. And in January, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, predicted that AI
technology would effectively match the performance of a midlevel software engineer
sometime this year.
Computer science programs at universities
across the country are now scrambling to understand the implications of the
technological transformation, grappling with what to keep teaching in the AI
era. Ideas range from less emphasis on mastering programming languages to
focusing on hybrid courses designed to inject computing into every profession,
as educators ponder what the tech jobs of the future will look like in an AI
economy.
Heightening the sense of urgency is a tech
job market that has tightened in recent years. Computer science graduates are
finding that job offers, once plentiful, are often scarce. Tech companies are
relying more on AI for some aspects of coding, eliminating some entry-level
work.
The National Science Foundation is funding a program, Level Up AI, to bring together university and community college educators and researchers to move toward a shared vision of the essentials of AI education. The 18-month project, run by the Computing Research Association, a research and education nonprofit, in partnership with New Mexico State University, is organizing conferences and round tables and producing white papers to share resources and best practices. (Steve Lohr)
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