The Major in Artificial Intelligence conferred at IIT Ropar by Prof. Sudarshan Iyengar — and a long conversation afterwards about what the field leaves for engineers.
Eighteen months of coursework closed out: the Major Degree in Artificial Intelligence at IIT Ropar, run with NSDC and Masai, completed alongside a full engineering degree rather than after it.
The certificate was handed over by Prof. Sudarshan Iyengar, whose research at IIT Ropar is in collective intelligence and social computing — how groups come to know things, which is an unusually good lens to have on a field currently arguing about machines that do — and whose NPTEL and SWAYAM courses have taught this subject to more people than most universities will reach in a century.
Which is why the conversation afterwards was the part worth travelling for. Someone who has explained computing to that many learners has no patience for the fashionable version of a question, and the one on the table was where artificial intelligence is actually going and what it leaves for engineers to do. The honest form of it is not whether the work disappears. It is which parts of it stop being valuable and which become the whole job — and an answer to that, from someone with that vantage point, is a better thing to carry out of a programme than the certificate is.
Divyakush Punjabi