Our Story
Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in the world today. Its impact is transformational and it is disrupting society and industry alike. Over the last decade major advances have been achieved due to the availability of vast amounts of digital data, the availability of powerful computing architectures, and advances in AI techniques, such as machine learning. Over the last decade, we have seen major AI-enabled developments in autonomous vehicles, healthcare, home/service robots, education, cybersecurity, predictive policing, game playing, to name but a few.
Fundamental scientific advances in automated reasoning, Boolean satisfiability, and complex problem-solving, have brought within reach a variety of intractable AI tasks that arise in scheduling, diagnosis, model-based reasoning, security, verification, and planning. Access to large, complex and semantic data, has led to advances in natural language processing, vision, and machine translation. The ethical issues raised by autonomous AI systems, the impact of bias, and lack of algorithmic and data transparency, are now major concerns in terms of the societal impact of AI. To be properly prepared for the AI-enabled world of today, students must be: exposed to a broad range of AI techniques; capable of viewing AI in the context of more complex software and hardware systems; capable of seeing the opportunities and challenges for the application of AI; able to design, implement, and test, an AI solution; and, cognisant of the ethical, societal, and economic, implications of AI.