AI is one of [Jessy] Lin’s key interests in computer science, and she’s currently working in the Computational Cognitive Science group of Professor Josh Tenenbaum, which develops computational models of how humans and machines learn. The knowledge she’s gained through her other major, philosophy, relates more closely this work than it might seem, she says.
“There are a lot of ideas in [AI and language-learning] that tie into ideas from philosophy,” she says. “How the mind works, how we reason about things in the world, what concepts are. There are all these really interesting abstract ideas that I feel like … studying philosophy surprisingly has helped me think about better.”
Lin says she didn’t know a lot about philosophy coming into college. She liked the first class she took, during her first year, so she took another one, and another — before she knew it, she was hooked. It started out as a minor; this past spring, she declared it as a major.
“It helped me structure my thoughts about the world in general, and think more clearly about all kinds of things,” she says.
Through an interdisciplinary class on ethics and AI ethics, Lin realized the importance of incorporating perspectives from people who don’t work in computer science. Rather than writing those perspectives off, she wants to be someone inside the tech field who considers issues from a humanities perspective and listens to what people in other disciplines have to say.
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