The Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants to educate students for a future where artificial intelligence will have a role in every scientific discipline.

To this end, the university today announced plans to establish a $1 billion college that will work to advance both the development of AI and its adoption across fields outside computing science. MIT said that it has already raised about two-thirds of the necessary funds and expects to launch the faculty in 2019.

The Schwarzman College of Computing is set to open next September, then relocate to its own dedicated building in 2022. It’s set to operate alongside MIT’s five existing schools and is expected to take charge of several departments currently spread out across different parts of the university. That includes the famed Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which counts Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee among its many notable alumni.

MIT intends to add 50 new faculty members to the college on top of the personnel that will be joining from existing departments. Half will do their work inside the center, while a quarter will collaborate with the other schools to instill AI skills in students.

“The key connector of the College to MIT’s five schools with be the 25 ‘bridge’ faculty: joint faculty appointments linking the College with departments across MIT,” the university wrote in a memo. “With this new structure, MIT aims to educate students who are ‘bilingual’ — adept in computing, as well as in their primary field. The College will also connect with the rest of MIT through its work to develop shared computing resources — infrastructure, instrumentation, and technical staffing.”

The move comes at a time when AI is being applied across more and more areas. In August, Facebook Inc. teamed up with the New York University School of Medicine on a machine learning project that aims to speed up medical imaging. Alphabet Inc., meanwhile, has been working with Harvard to build an AI that can predict earthquake aftershocks.

The launch of MIT’s new college will no doubt come as welcome news to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, which are all actively expanding their AI efforts and do a lot of recruiting at the university. The strong demand for machine learning talent has created an industrywide shortage.

This issue also affects companies in other markets such as autos that are harnessing AI as part of autonomous driving plans. The growing need for engineers well-versed in machine learning will over time likely lead other universities to follow MIT’s example and embrace a more proactive attitude toward the trend.

The tech industry, meanwhile, is investing in its own AI education initiatives. And the major cloud providers are developing products intend to make machine learning accessible to a broader subset of the workers in the typical enterprise.  

Photo: Christopher Harting/MIT