The State of Ohio approved the master's in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in February 2021. Kent State University will start admitting students in the master's in Artificial Intelligence program starting fall 2021. The program will be offered within the Department of Computer Science.
Amazon’s Alexa, iPhone’s Siri, the Roomba and many more innovations are examples of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is changing the world and simplifying life for everyone, resulting in a growing demand for AI professionals.
Javed Khan, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science, said AI's focus is to solve real-world computationally prohibitive problems by simulating human intelligence where computer algorithms cannot solve them in a reasonable time.
Arvind Bansal, professor in the Department of Computer Science directing the master's in AI program said, artificial intelligence emulates human smartness. AI can solve real-world problems and test skills by combining human intelligence with the fast processing power of a computer. It is aided by the availability of huge amounts of data. It has found its way into many sectors with real-life applications.
According to Bansal, AI techniques are ready to be implemented in society. The education, insurance, finance, health care, elderly care, transportation, energy sector, smart homes and city planning industries are areas already getting transformed by artificial intelligence.
The current demands to promote AI for U.S. industries is expected to remain competitive globally and to grow at 20-30 percent with a multibillion dollar investment from the industry sector, according to Khan
"While the demand is very high and growing, there is an insufficient number of qualified AI graduates in the market,” Khan said. “There are many growth areas, including computer vision, natural language interaction with machines and intelligent pattern detection for optimization."
The inadequate number of AI graduates led to the creation of Kent State’s master's program in artificial intelligence. In 2018, Melody Tankersley, Ph.D., senior vice president and provost at Kent State, and her team initiated the proposal to offer a Master's program in AI to alleviate the limited number of qualified graduates in Ohio.
Khan said Kent State’s master's in AI program has three theme areas: intelligent analytics, robotics and smart cities and automation. Besides mandatory core courses related to the theory of AI, machine learning and advanced databases, each theme area has multiple courses. Students can pick elective courses from any themed area to create their focus.
Students enrolled in the major will learn AI theory and how to program and apply AI to solve healthcare data analysis, intelligent analysis of large-scale data and processes, computer vision and image analysis for diagnostics, human-machine interactions, robotics, natural language interaction with machines, intelligent information visualization, Internet of Things, immersive visualization and interaction and more.
For more information about this program, visit: https://www.kent.edu/cs/ms-degree-artificial-intelligence-ai.