Bulletin No. 1, 2021

32 CHINESE UNIVERSITY BULLETIN NO.1, 2021 AI: EDUCATION Prof. Irwin King Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering I f there is one thing I have learnt from covering AI, it is the importance of education. Speaking to our expert sources, each having their own focus, one really begins to see howAI presents unique opportunities and challenges in different fields. And yet with every one of our experts, the issue of education cropped up at some point in their response. Indeed, with all the different revelations AI may have for each area of our life, they face the same problems of being misunderstood or not getting enough attention to begin with. I myself constantly struggled to ask the experts the right questions, having never been formally taught about AI. How should we move forward from here? IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, AI education has quickly become a key area of development for universities around the world, CUHK being no exception. In 2019, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) launched the Artificial Intelligence: Systems & Technologies (AIST) programme, the first of its kind in Hong Kong. Two years into its inception, Prof. Irwin King , chairman of CSE, counted the programme a success in terms of getting strong students from around the world and with students achieving stellar academic results. And over the past two years, changes have been made to enhance the programme, an example being the addition of a first-year survey course and an elective on applied deep learning to the curriculum. However, Professor King also noted a challenge they are facing. ‘In some ways, it’s a small-scale way of training students. We only have around 40 of them in the programme.’ Surely engineering is not the only field that sees an ever- greater need to teach AI. For instance, the undergraduate Urban Studies Programme now covers an area of concentration on smart sustainable cities, whichwill involve training students to make use of big data. In a similar vein, the Faculty of Social Science launched the Data Science and Policy Studies (DSPS) programme in 2019. Looking back on the last two years, Prof. Wilson Wong, the programme AI FOR KIDS