Artificial intelligence

What do you come out with? BSc/ MEng.

Why do it? Anyone familiar with the film A.I Artificial Intelligence starring Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law may have a confused understanding of the term. To clarify: AI is not about teaching robots to love humans. It is about teaching machines to replicate and engage in tasks of human intelligence, and you can study this for an undergraduate degree. The subject is a fantastically complicated strand of computer science that is used broadly in modern society. From generating medical infrastructure for hospitals, to creating animated tools for construction and generating robotic waiters for Sushi restaurants - it is an industry that has moved straight out of sci-fi movies and into our daily lives.

What's it about? The subject is crucial to the development of some technologies and is not just about Robot Wars-style toy invention. It is creative, extremely elaborate and has the potential to revolutionise the world we live in by teaching computers to copy human learning patterns within robotic constructions. To study this subject you need to learn about biology, engineering, computer programming, psychology, mathematics and more. Only a select few universities offer AI as a straight subject. This includes the universities of Bradford, Westminster, Durham, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Royal Holloway and Manchester Metropolitan. However, more than 100 institutions on UCAS offer AI in conjunction with computer science or other joint honours such as biology, philosophy and engineering. For AI and cybernetics look at Reading.

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How long is a degree? Four years at Edinburgh, Manchester University and Liverpool. Three or four year sandwich courses at Westminster. Mostly three years as a joint honours degree.

What are the students like? “There are usually more boys with long hair than girls in an AI lecture hall,” says one student. The cyber geek stereotype still dominates, with boffin-like boys typing their way to world domination via codes and technology impenetrable to the average person. Surprisingly more girls are getting interested in computer science and AI. Nearly 15 per cent of Edinburgh’s informatics department are female which (although still not great) is a lot higher than the average intake, something which it attributes to its success at recruiting girls from Eastern Europe where computing is not seen as such a male subject.

How is it packaged? At Edinburgh, which has the biggest informatics department in the UK, students are given specialist computer training for the first two years, specialise in groups in the third year and complete individual projects in their fourth year- this final project is like a dissertation and makes up half of the degree mark. At Liverpool you cover programming in Java script, computer systems, databases, the rather mind-boggling sounding human-centric computing and algorithms as a basic foundation in computer science but with modules in AI on top of this. At Sussex the computing and AI BSc covers an interdisciplinary mix of programming, software, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience in the first year, but students can tailor their studies from two subject streams in the second year to focus more on either AI technology or computing.

What A-levels do you need? Mathematics - usually grade B or above. Some places require biology and chemistry A-levels but this varies.

What grades? Manchester AAA; Liverpool ABB; Manchester Metropolitan requires 220-280 UCAS points, which is around BCE to BBC.

Will you be interviewed? Not usually.

Will it keep you off the dole? Graduates go into software development, IT consultancy, applications engineering and join big technological corporations for training contracts. AI wasn’t analysed as a separate subject by the National Student Survey but for computer science (which includes AI) Imperial, Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, York and Royal Holloway have the best graduate employment rates, at 97 to 89 per cent.

What do students say? “The teaching is one of the strongest parts of the degree program. The lecturers all have great characters and there were precious few who I didn’t get on with,” says Robert Redwood, a 2009 computing and AI graduate from Sussex.

“There aren’t many girls on the course in general so we’ve set up a society called Hoppers which runs a couple of events a year- mostly a lab lunch where we order lots of pizza and chat and eat. We also run careers events asking big names in business to come and speak at dinners which provides a link between university students and professionals,” says Kate Ho, a former AI undergraduate at Edinburgh and current Phd student.

“I got some advice from my computing teacher at A-level when I was looking at what to apply for because although I liked it I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a programmer. She told me about AI and said there was lots of money in it [laughs]. It is a subject that is definitely worth looking at for anyone who wants to study anything related to computers,” says Kathryn Walker, a second year AI student at Manchester Metropolitan.

Where's best for teaching? Not covered separately by the NSS, so difficult to tell, but for computer science Leicester scored 4.20, Dundee 4.12, Loughborough and De Montfort 4.11 and Cambridge 4.10 for teaching.

Where's best for research? AI was not assessed separately by the research assessment exercise, but for computer science Cambridge came top with 3.35 out of 5; Imperial College, Edinburgh and Southampton all scored 3.20; and UCL and Oxford 3.15.

Where's the cutting edge? There isn’t much that isn’t cutting edge for AI. It’s only been taught at UK universities since the late 1980s and by its very nature has had to change with the times and ever-expanding technologies since. American universities such as Stanford and MIT are advanced for AI training degrees, although they’re more likely to be titled “artificial intelligence and robotics”.

Who are the stars? Professor David Hogg of the University of Leeds, who heads the Computer Vision group; Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deputy head (research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton. He is a founding Ddctor of the Web Science Research Initiative;UCL's Professor Derek Hill is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of IXICO, a global image message service; Professor Max Bramer of Portsmouth, head of an AI research group. Dr Des Watson, a senior lecturer in software systems at Sussex, “knows everything”, according to one of his students.

Added value: At Edinburgh they have a third-year group project which pits students against each other. This year their task was to make a footballing robot. They then had a tournament and the winner was chosen - not on ball skills but on technical prowess! “Geek Girls” dinners, also at Edinburgh, run by the Hoppers, a society run by computer science girls to support each other academically and to socialise.