Top Takeaways
- UC San Diego began offering AI degrees this school year, following Stanford, which was the first in California to do so in 2020.
- UCSD’s AI major requires students to take several computer science courses.
- USC will begin offering AI degrees in the fall with a class of 30 students.
Ever since she was a child, Christine Antonie wanted to follow in her parents’ footsteps and major in computer science in college. With their degrees, both parents went off to successful careers; her mother worked for years as a principal applications developer and her father built a career as a data and technical architect.
In her junior year of high school, Antonie started thinking about what job fields would interest her in the future. She noticed artificial intelligence (AI) usage growing on online platforms and how it looked like “so many different fields use AI.” For a long time, Antonie debated whether AI would be her path.
Antonie joined an online program called Inspirit AI, where she learned the basics of AI programming and worked on a three-month project across 10 sessions. The students were put into groups of five and created a video program that would analyze photos of automobile drivers. Drivers’ faces were scanned to evaluate their eyelines and the direction they were facing. The program would notify the students if the driver was deemed distracted.
“We made an AI model that would determine if (automobile) drivers were distracted or focused,” Antonie said. “I feel like seeing how you could use this in the real world really made me interested in AI.”…