I'm a prof but not in a research dept . We mostly teach undergrads and don't offer a PhD. AI agents are letting me tackle projects I've had in mind for years but haven't had the resources to put any sustained effort into. Transformational (maybe, we'll see how it goes)
I think we're going to need CS PhD students to do far more than provide accountability, by which I think Sayash means do code review for AI agents and make sure the agent isn't making silly mistakes.
The main value of a strong PhD student for a PI is that they're immersed in a
In the last few months, I've spoken to many CS professors who asked me if we even need CS PhD students anymore. Now that we have coding agents, can't professors work directly with agents?
My view is that equipping PhD students with coding agents will allow them to do work that
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Now I'm convinced. I'm replacing the thermostat housing on my ancient Audi. Of course, a little plastic doohickey broke off when I took it apart. I can't find it on any parts diagram and I have no idea what it's called so I can't look it up. 1/2
Good news: I'm giving two talks at #LSA2025 in January!
Bad news: they've scheduled them back-to-back in two different sessions 😶
Anyone know how to get in touch with the organizers?
"Golden age" symbolic NLP was a direct outgrowth of first wave AI -- NLP and AI have never been clearly distinguishable fields. (I'd also argue that generative grammar is much more a child of AI than of pre-Chomsky language sciences...)
