Prasad Tadepalli visits with his former student, Sriraam Natarajan, who is now a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Professor Prasad Tadepalli is director of Oregon State University’s graduate program in artificial intelligence and a longtime researcher in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In a recent interview, he talked about the graduate AI program, as well as some general trends in AI at Oregon State and beyond.
Below are a few highlights from this interview (which you can read in its entirety via the link below):
An overview of the AI program at Oregon State: “The program is intended to solve a need for specializing in AI, but also to serve people who have expertise in other disciplines. So, it’s an interdisciplinary program that is distinct from, for example, getting a degree in computer science and specializing in AI, which is the traditional route. And one reason we thought this would be a good idea is that, over time, the field of AI has moved more toward mathematics and statistical and optimization approaches, which are studied in other fields in addition to computer science.”
Views on AI interdisciplinarity: “The way I look at AI is that it is a kind of outward-looking face of computer science, more toward how to apply efficient algorithms and optimization methods to problems of the real world, whether they are problems about climate change or oceanography or engineering.”
Views on explainable AI. Essentially, how does a computer explain how it arrived at a decision? “One thing that we are working on is trying to make neural networks more transparent. We call this explainable AI. One problem, a computer does something, we look at the thing and say, ‘Well, look at that thing in the phone, or in the computer,’ but we don’t understand why it is there. Sometimes, when the system makes a mistake, there is no explanation for that either. So, for an end user, that’s a very unsatisfactory kind of state.”
To see Tadepalli’s wider thoughts on a variety of topics read his full interview.
If you’re interested in connecting with the AI and Robotics Program for hiring and collaborative projects, please contact AI-OSU@oregonstate.edu.