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CHENNAI: From predicting delivery time of food ordered on apps to suggesting short clips or movies on social media sites as per the taste of the user, artificial intelligence already has its compulsive grip on our daily life. The emergence of ChatGPT, Googles Bard and a few live voice translation apps has created so much excitement among students and parents that BTech AI and data science courses have become the most preferred after computer science engineering this year.With colleges increasing their intake, around 16,000 students will be joining AI and data science courses in 2023-24. But the colleges are hardly ready to teach the rapidly developing and transforming field. Most engineering colleges do not have trained faculty members to teach AI. Whether the graduates will be industry-ready when they pass out four years is hardly known.Students, under peer pressure, are already flocking to the highly specialized BTech course under management quota. Experts say that they should have application-oriented knowledge, exposure to data management and machine learning.Colleges say they will use live problems to teach AI and other emerging areas. Some colleges are developing courses with industry experts and foreign universities.We have professors of practice from IT companies like Cognizant who train our students with live problems, said Abhay Meganathan, vicechairman, Rajalakshmi Group of Institutions.Some colleges are encouraging their faculty members to enroll in online degrees, certificate courses and hackathons to get trained in coding skills and artificial intelligence.Experts say fundamentally there is not much difference between computer science engineering and AI.Fundamentally, the curriculum will be common for these courses, said Anna University vice-chancellor R Velraj.He also said AI will not take away jobs. It will increase engineering jobs as we will need more engineers to deploy AI systems, Velraj said.To tap the opportunities in emerging areas, Anna University plans to offer a chance to study AI, data science to all engineering students.Colleges should teach students to solve real world problems to produce quality AI engineers. Students who want to become AI engineers, should be very good in programming, said professor B Ravindran, head, Centre for Responsible AI, IIT Madras.He also assured that jobs will not be taken away. AI is not mature to the point where you can replace humans completely with AI, he added. Some experts warned against creating more seats in AI saying students from tier-2, tier-3 colleges will struggle to get jobs of their choice.The number of jobs in AI has increased. But, not to the extent that educational institutions have increased their intake so on and so forth. Students - especially from non top-tier institutions - often struggle to get jobs of their choice after doing specialisation in AI, said Shourya Roy, president, ACM India Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.AI CURRENTLY USED INMovie recommendations on online streaming platforms including OTTVideo recommendations on YouTubeFood delivery apps use AI to predict expected delivery timeOnline shopping sites using AI for their operations to combine orders, selecting warehouses to ship productsRide hailing apps to predict travel timeVirtual assistant devices and assistant appsHOW WILL IT BE DIFFERENT FROM THE COMPUTER SCIENCE CURRICULUM?Fundamentals are common for both computer science and AI. Students need to learn more continuous maths like probability theory, linear algebra, optimization. Students need to be strong in the fundamentals of maths and computing. AI engineering needs very good programming skills.HOW MANY SEATS AVAILABLE IN BTECH AI AND DATA SCIENCEMore than 16,000 seats will be available in BTech AI and data science courses in engineering colleges for 2023-24 academic year

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Tamil Nadu: Its a mad rush for AI, data science courses, and how - Indiatimes.com