Santa Clara University Introduces New Responsible AI Minor
Photo Credit: Associated Press
A new minor in Responsible AI launched this fall to help students understand the opportunities and challenges posed by this rapidly emerging technology.
“This minor is going to help students understand what are the capabilities of AI,” said Dr. Susan Kennedy, an assistant professor in the Santa Clara University Philosophy Department. “How does it work? How can I tie these problems I’m seeming to the technical features of these systems?”
Kennedy and Dr. Yi Fang in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSEN) came together to create the new minor collaborating with over ten other departments. The goal is to offer a holistic approach to AI that explores issues of safety, privacy, truthfulness, fairness and transparency.
Touching on transparency, Fang says that they want students, “to understand why AI makes such decisions even if the decision is correct.”
The process of creating the minor took longer than expected as it took insights from multiple departments. While a typical minor takes 10 months to create, planning for the Responsible AI minor began in Sept. 2023, and is now just this fall being launched to students.
The required courses for the minor range from six to nine classes depending on prior requirements met, yet many of the courses available can also fulfill the core or major requirements therefore reducing the coursework required.
The Responsible AI minor is structured in a way to allow students to come to their own conclusion about AI, in response to the dramatically polarizing views surrounding AI in popular media.
When producing the outline for the minor, Kennedy and Fang made sure to keep in mind Santa Clara University’s mission to prepare students for the future.
Reflecting back on this connection of the minor to Santa Clara’s mission, Kennedy said, “I think this Responsible AI minor and the way that it’s designed gives students a certain kind of opportunity or a leg up, an advantage, so I hope they take advantage of that.”
One of the many goals of this minor was making it accessible to a wide variety of majors, not just students majoring in computer science or philosophy.
“Whether you’re planning on developing [AI], whether you’re planning on interacting with it, or you’re just someone who’s going to be impacted by it,” Kennedy said, “chances are you’re going to fall in one of those categories.”
With that in mind, they set up the minor in a way that students are able to take different pathways depending on their background in CSEN. If you are a student with a limited background in CSEN, there are classes that make that portion more accessible.
The minor did not require any new classes to be created, but rather it drew together many different classes the University already offers.
“It was pretty cool that we were able to work with things we already had on the books, as opposed to trying to create new courses just for this minor,” Kennedy said.
This sentiment is echoed by students as well.
“I like how it includes classes that we’ve already done in the past so it’s easy for students who’ve already taken all the core computer science classes to kind of add this on and learn about the ethics side of AI, which I think is just as important as learning all the technical skills,” said junior Brandon Ng, President of AI Collaborate.
Since the announcement of the minor, there has already been a significant amount of interest. According to Fang, it comes from a wide range of majors, including computer science, business and biology.
“That shows that we were really successful in being able to make this something that was attractive and feasible for students, even if they aren't primarily in philosophy or CSEN,” Kennedy said.
While doing research and constructing the minor, they found that many schools newly offering AI programs such as Northeastern University weren’t making their courses multidisciplinary. Rather they would stay on one end of the spectrum or the other, making their courses either lean heavily toward the technical or ethical foundations of AI.
“That’s one of the distinct advantages of the way that it’s set up, that students have both the strong technical foundation as well as the ethical foundation,” Kennedy said.