Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest topics within the tech industry, with OpenAI and ChatGPT making headlines even in mainstream news publications. There possibly has never been a more relevant time to take a class on the subject of AI, so this fall I enrolled in Georgia Tech's CS 7637: Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence - Cognitive Systems course. I had some previous academic experience with AI from my time as an undergrad at Northwestern, but I was interested in revisiting the subject since so much has changed in the field since then. However, this class focused largely on classic AI techniques and didn't delve too deeply into newer topics such as Large Language Models (LLMs) or other forms of generative AI. Despite being a little outdated, it was interesting thinking about AI approaches modeled after our own human cognition, and this class was as much understanding human learning as it was machine learning.
CS 7637 featured a fairly rapid pace of coursework, with a new deliverable due every week. The class assignments fell into one of three categories: mini-projects, written homework, and the Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) project.
In addition to the above assignments, there were two open-book multiple choice exams as well as a class participation requirement.
However, when I look back on this past semester, the defining feature of CS 7637 wasn't the assignments, exams, or other coursework. Instead, I remember all of the drama on the class forum throughout the course. There were several controversial decisions by the teaching staff that received mixed or negative reactions from the student body, which added unnecessary stress and frustration to the course.
One such decision involved their ruling on an unconventional approach to the RPM project. The project submission was graded against both known and hidden test cases, with the intention of having the hidden test cases validate that the agent's approach was generally applicable across any and all RPM problems. A very clever student discovered a way to harvest the correct answers from the autograder and then hardcoded their agent to correctly answer all questions. They then publicly posted their approach on the class forum seeking teaching staff approval for this methodology, which resulted in many other students copying the approach. The teaching staff were slow to respond to this discussion, and ultimately ruled that this approach fell under the AI strategy of "learning by recording cases" and was therefore valid.
Many students felt that this approach violated the spirit of the course, since it did not require any "intelligence" on behalf of the agent. Personally, I don't blame any student who implemented this method in their agent since it was not explicitly denied by the teaching staff. However, since I did not use this approach, it was frustrating to know many students received a perfect performance score without having to implement any of the concepts covered in the course. This controversy raises interesting questions about defining intelligence in computer systems: is it just a matter of getting the correct answer by any means, or does the implementation matter? How do we define if an implementation is intelligent?
Overall, I was a little disappointed in CS 7637 since I had pretty high hopes for this course. I enjoyed CS 6750: Human-Computer Interaction, another Dr. Joyner-composed class, so I did not expect CS 7637 to be so disorganized. Dr. Joyner was not directly involved in the course this past semester, so perhaps that contributed to some of the communication issues, although I don't think it would've prevented any of the controversy. The class material was perfectly fine, if a little out of date, so hopefully the teaching staff will apply the lessons learned from this semester in order to improve future iterations of this course.
~ MAD