we're going to do it with computers

[alexr_rwx]

Talking with Mike today, I brought up some of my frustrations with the CS program here, wondering whether I should switch to Cognitive Science or something else.

In a lot of ways, cogsci sounds kind of like what I want to do, and as I understand it, the program here is quite good. Discussing with Mike today, though, we uncovered two objections to my switching over: (a) they only have so much funding, and probably won't admit many students in the near future, and (b) to be in the cogsci program, it's pretty important that you care about cognition.

He said, and this made me feel really good: he likes that my goal is building software, because that's what he's out to do now too. Questions of psychological plausibility are only so interesting. (and they are kind of interesting.) But we're not going to do machine translation with brains, we're going to do it with computers, and hopefully it'll be useful to people.

(the downside, of course: I may have to take some dumb CS distribution requirement courses, which I feel like I shouldn't have to take because, y'know, I've already got an MS in this, and it's senselessly difficult to get my classes from gatech to transfer here.)

Comments

[lyceum-arabica.livejournal.com]

on the transferring of classes... this is a pretty small-town department, there might be more than one way to do something. if you're trying to transfer a class, you could talk to the profs that teach the IU version, maybe even ask to take last semester's final or something, and demonstrate that you not only took a course at GA with the relevant title, you also know everything from the IU course (which for a number of cases can be accomplished with a weekend of studying).

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

That's a really good idea. I'd really rather not take theory again, but I bet I could do alright the 501 exam, with a little bit of brushing up...

(although I've heard that Leivant uses some pretty unusual notation -- t/f?)

[lyceum-arabica.livejournal.com]

true... but he also uses it on the written theory quals, which are all posted online, and in his class notes (which lindsey or someone else may have... or even the website, I don't think that's protected) Shouldn't be too big a deal to review.