Abstract:

In recent years, artificial intelligence has become a key technology in the development of products, services and solutions in many economic sectors. Despite being a discipline with a long history, recent technological and computational advances have promoted and multiplied its field of application, making it a fundamental tool when it comes to addressing many of the challenges that are presented to us as a society. Although artificial intelligence has traditionally been part of computer science studies at the university level, the technological revolution that has taken place in recent years has given it sufficient importance to be considered as its own discipline with its own degree studies, clearly differentiated from other related degrees and masters.

The design of the degree is adapted to the completely transversal nature of artificial intelligence, which should allow graduates to occupy jobs in practically any economic and social sector: public administrations, industry, health institutions, financial entities, the media, institutions cultural consultants, research centers, etc. Graduates will have the ability to join multidisciplinary teams where they collaborate with experts from different fields (scientists, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, economists, ...) to design innovative computational solutions that generate added value in multiple fields of knowledge.

The Autonomous University of Barcelona has a multidisciplinary university campus that can allow addressing the intrinsic transversality of artificial intelligence both from the point of view of the technical and cognitive foundations of the discipline, as well as the ethical, legal and social implications, and practical application to a wide variety of domains: health, biological, financial, social data, etc. The definition of the degree has been leaded by the School of Engineering but with the participation of 8 faculties and 2 research centres. Therefore, a challenge in the collaborative task of defining a degree with a global spirit: reflecting the transversal scope of artificial intelligence.

The transversality of the curriculum, the top-down approach in its definition, the consultation on the industrial regional ecosystem, advantage of a multidisciplinary campus where a wide range of expertise do cohabitate, all are factors that should be ingredients of new approaches to curriculum definition, therefore presented here to share the experience and to inspirit other challenges like this one.

In this communication we present a transversal-multidisciplinary approach to degree curriculum development for what we call a Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence degree. This is the roadmap UAB took two years ago and that has successfully arrived to a university degree currently offered. In addition, the degree has been designed to include new teaching approaches such as challenge based, teaching in collaboration with companies, Tan based and collaborative learning, etc

Keywords:

Curriculum Development, Artificial Intelligence, Transversal approach, Multidisciplinarity.