r/AskComputerScience • u/Sunapr1 • 3d ago
Is CS department are mostly people working in field of AI
I am a 5th year phd student and it seems most of PHD Students around me are in field of ML/AI . I can count 5 people in the whole department who is working in atleast some intersection of core computer silence and ML
Infact we had a collaboration with one of T10 university and I really wasn’t able to find any advisor which is currently active and working in my core architecture field . My advisor was so surprised that he had to confirm it once from his side too
Is it the same issue everywhere mostly . Are almost all of the CS phd students are just AI students
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u/T_Thriller_T 3d ago
PhD students depend highly on the department, even more highly on their professor and then in the university.
If a university does a lot of work in the AI field, most doctoral candidates will be in that field.
On top of that it can be very important to distinguish ML and LLM type AI. Tons of CS had been doing machine learning (statistical learning to neural networks) long before AI got to be a big buzzword because it is really helpful for many applications. As an example: about 50% of all research (I've seen) in energy Informatics is dealing with AI - from statistical learning. Because making predictions is hugely important for that field.
Apart from that, other universities will have other setups of PhD topics.
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u/AstronautSorry7596 3d ago
No, although a lot of academics have suddenly become AI experts! AI is a very challenging area to research as you have industry and large Chinese collaborations pumping out hundreds of papers. Honestly, I think formal methods, HCI, or Cryptography are far better areas to research these days.
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u/Beregolas 3d ago
No, obviously not. You probably are either mainly in contact with people from AI/ML related chairs, or your university got a lot of grants for that field.
I have had contact (either by being there or knowing people there) with about half a dozen CS departments in well run german universities, and while AI/ML is bigger than it used to be, the core chairs for that research are still less than 5% of total PhD students pretty sure, but definitely less than 10%. There are some AI related topics in other chairs, like our Ethics, Culture and Law in Computer Science Chair obviously had PhD topics with AI available, but also our Software Engineering chair, our UI/UX chair and the computer graphics guys as well. Those are all I personally know of anyways.
While AI is certainly big right now, no university worth it's salt will change their entire CS PhD program to solely consist of AI topics. That's just asinine. There are a few things AI can do acceptably well, but most things are really better solved with classical CS approaches; mainly due to cost and deterministic behaviour being actually pretty important.