a brief promorobotics.stanford.edu/~sahami/sss08/slides/breck.pdf · a new start: innovative...

A New Start: Innovative Introductory AI-Centered Courses at Cornell

A brief promo...

A New Start: Innovative Introductory AI-Centered Courses

at CornellEric Breck, David Easley, K-Y Daisy Fan, Jon Kleinberg,

Lillian Lee, Jennifer Wofford, and Ramin Zabih


Bringing students to CS

• Fewer Computer Science students!

• Especially at the freshman level

• Students think computer science is dull

• Show them cutting-edge research: AI!

• Can’t have “one-size-fits-all”


Why AI for a CS intro?

• Concreteness

• Robots, spam-filtering, search engines

• Broad, interdisciplinary appeal

• Connections to economics, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and other fields


Four courses

• Computation, Information, and Intelligence

• Networks

• Computation and Culture in a Digital Age

• Introduction to Computation with Robotics

• All have websites; some texts in prep


Computation, Information, and Intelligence

• No programming

• No prerequisites besides calculus

• But students know web search, language

• Pencil-and-paper problems


Perceptron learning

• Introduce via geometric and trigonometric ideas

• Discuss proof of convergence

• Modify proof and discuss consequences



Information Retrieval

• Students are familiar with search engines

• Vector-space model

• Builds on geometric concepts

• Link model

• PageRank, Hubs-and-authorities



Other Topics and Results

• Search, game-playing

• Network structure of the web

• Natural language processing

• Turing test, Chinese room, Loebner prize

• High enrollment of women



Networks

• Social, technological, natural worlds all exhibit network structure

• Cross-listed in CS, Economics, Information Science, and sociology

High-school dating(Bearman, Moody, and Stovel, 2004)

(Image by Mark Newman)

Corporate e-mail communication(Adamic and Adar, 2005)


Networks

• How do opinions, fads, and political movements move through society?

• How fragile are food webs and financial markets?

• How is the popularity of websites distributed and why?

Some Questions


Networks

• Social networks

• Nash equilibria in auctions, traffic

• Markets and strategic interaction

Graph theory & Game Theory


Networks

• Search engines

• Keyword-based advertising

• Policy implications - voting, intellectual property

Information networks and the web


Networks


Networks

• Class blog (3 graded posts per student)

• Attracted interest from business world

• High re-enrollment in second running (over 200 students, over 25 majors)

• Almost no existing reading material at the right level

Other topics and results


Computation and Culture in a Digital Age

• Summer course for high school students

• Cornell’s Summer Explorations Program

• Goal: explore ideas from computing and their role in society



• A program that gets better from experience

• Some methods - rules, weights, memory

• Spam classification

Machine learning



• Tasks - question answering, translation

• Experiments with web translators

• Puzzles from the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad

Natural Language Processing



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• Introduction to programming with MATLAB

• Human Computer Interaction

• Ethics and culture

Other Topics


Introduction to Computing with Robotics

• Focus on sensing, not reasoning or control

• Programming in MATLAB 7

CS100R robots (not to scale)

Sony AIBO iRobot Create



• Determine position and orientation of a light stick

• Algorithmic development

• Sorting, median-finding

Finding the red light



• Analyze odometry data

• Least-squares fitting

• Implement gradient descent

A Robot Speedometer



• Distinguishing between Coke & Pepsi cans

• Which robot moved? - Image differencing

• Open-ended final projects

Other Topics


Other Introductory CS at Cornell

• Computing in the Arts

• Visual Imaging in the Electronic Age

• “regular” intro courses

• Java, MATLAB


AcknowledgmentsTeaching assistants and course consultants

Steve Baker, Jared Cantwell, Tze Jian Chear, Chris Danis, Ray Doyle, Rafael Frongillo, Nick Gallo, Jon Guarino, Abraham Heifets, Amanda Holland-Minkley, Marek Janicki, Tian Liang, Homan Lee, Yuzhe Liu, Selina Lok, Ezra Kannof, Devin Kennedy, Blazej Kot, Elliot Kulakow, Shannon McGrath, Brian Mick, Anton Morozov, Milo Polte, Ben Pu, Neeta Rattan, Brian Rogan, Gurmeet Singh, Sara Tansey,Mark Yatskar, Adam Yeh, Chong-Suk Yoon, and Yisong Yue

a brief promorobotics.stanford.edu/~sahami/sss08/slides/breck.pdf · a new start: innovative...

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