VUB launches Belgium’s first academic bachelor programme in artificial intelligence

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel will launch a bachelor of science (BSc) programme in artificial intelligence beginning in the academic year 2022-23. Jan Danckaert, interim rector and vice-rector of Education and Student Policy, said, " The proposed academic bachelor's programme will be the first in the Belgian and therefore also the Flemish university landscape to meet a real need in the labour market. VUB has repeatedly played a pioneering role in establishing new programmes and now wants to do the same in the field of AI and its social and economic applications. This programme has the potential to attract a broad intake of students thanks to its unique mix of STEM (maths, computer science) and humanities subjects (cognition, linguistics, law and ethics)." - Broad and interdisciplinary. The curriculum contains a broad range of basic subjects that are fundamental for the field of AI: algorithms and data structures, search processes, neural networks and other machine learning techniques, knowledge representation and reasoning, mathematics and scientific methods. In addition, there are four cross-disciplinary themes throughout the curriculum: ethics, human intelligence, artificial intelligence and scientific methods. These themes are explored by means of examples, applications and assignments. Bart De Boer, chair of the Programme Board, said, "In this programme, we study intelligence from different angles: we see how intelligence works in humans, how natural language works and why this is important for intelligence, how a group can sometimes be more intelligent than the individuals, how we can create intelligent systems ourselves, but also how we can use computer models to learn things about human intelligence.