I occasionally get missives from BYU CS dept, and in this last one they mentioned that there are more majors in the degree programs offered by the CS dept than any other dept on campus.

That came as a surprise. I would have guessed that whatever department the Accounting program was in would have the most majors, or perhaps some other business department.

BYU takes a lot of flack here, mostly justified. I regret that I had to waste 16 credits on religion classes when I can think of any number of other courses that would have been more useful. However, my CS education was pretty good.

In my teaching career I was “the curriculum guy”, so I spent a lot of time looking at curricula of other CS programs, and my department went through two accreditation reviews itself. The CS courses I had at BYU were IMHO clearly up to professional standards.

In my other career as a programmer, I got to work with people trained at other universities. Again, I didn’t feel like I was at any sort of professional disadvantage.

So, apparently they are offering popular majors. I suppose it is a bit of an honor having the most majors of any department on campus, but if I were teaching there, I’d find that news a little terrifying. That’s got to be like managing an aircraft carrier. Yikes!

Interesting.
I think more people are realizing jobs will involve computers so it makes sense.

Just think how many of those future graduates will be sitting around all day making memes for social media. ;-/

I don't think there would be a stigma about that major from BYU being heavily religious like there can be for other majors.

I'm sure they are churning out plenty of accountants and lawyers for future church leadership.

I'm rooting for AI.

The field is known to pay well. I wonder how many of the department's majors are female?

BYU does have some solid departments.

When I first started teaching, late 1970s, 40% of our majors were women. In the 1950s and 60s, the field was predominantly women. Recall the movie “Hidden Figures.”

Twenty five years later, in spite of good-faith efforts to reverse the trend, the number of female CS majors cratered. It was a nationwide trend, so it wasn’t just my school.

By the turn of the century, those 1980 female graduates from our program were managers, coming back to recruit our current graduates. Several of them actually asked where were all the women grads? We did not have a good answer.

When I returned to teaching after the dot com meltdown, I took some upper division math classes and a EE class. About a third of the students in those classes were women. We were lucky to hit 20%.

I still don’t have a good explanation. The field does seem to have more than its fair share of obnoxious a**holes (think Elon, among a host of others).

I think the situation has improved, but I am out of the loop now. I’m going back for a visit to my old department in a couple weeks. I’ll ask.

For the past 3 decades on the 3 largest northern hemisphere continents, I see the same challenge all the time with most women software developers. There are exceptions on this, but they are the minority. For the most part, they don't stick with it. It's rare to see any of them working to learn new skills on their own. This is an industry where you have to be a self-starter and self-learner to be successful long-term. If you require training/learning help, then you are being too much like a Machine for ML projects and it's a lot less expensive to use VMs or K8S containers than humans for these learning/training activities. I've tried very hard to recruit and retain women developers. The challenge on recruiting is that they almost always fall way short technically on what's needed, even though I'm extremely careful in making sure they get extra time to warm up for the interview, lots of open-ended questions, and opportunity to get back to me afterwards with any additional info they'd like to share. I'd never be so accommodating for male candidates. And the biggest challenge on woman programmers has been their remote project managers & customers not giving a d*** about the gender, age, or anything else but their deadlines and wanting the software to work as expected and bug-free. And when you have a woman programmer who is good having leadership ambitions then when they are in a lead role then they will be extra tough about considering having any fellow women on their development teams because they won't put up with any sh*t performance from their fellow women. If any of you doubt me on this then go look at the stats on StackOverflow and other sites on the demographics of who does deep-diving and proactive activities in the software development industry on the most currently in-demand 100+ technical topics. If we're going to see a higher percentage of senior-level women software developers in the workforce then it's going to show up strongly in the data on who is being proactive on getting help to solve complex technical issues. I think we need to do more to help women have successful careers. So, please encourage more of them to spend more time on StackOverflow and other websites working through challenging technical problems that'll help them get the experience/skills needed to land better jobs. So, I'm going to keep on trying to help women programmers succeed. I've had some success on this. But, for the most part, their heart isn't in it, they drop out in big numbers, and most who do stay don't treat it like a career but just a job that they have to survive.

Whenever I hear people complain about wage inequality I immediately wonder if the data they're using is factoring in skills/experience on the most in-demand requirements that the market has for human labor. If women and men having equal expertise on some list of skills needed for a job's tech stack aren't getting paid equally then that should be fixed. But if the tech stack calls for Angular 12, Node JS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, CSS, HTML5, C#, MVC, Rest API, ACR, AKS, CosmosDB, MongoDB, SQL Server, T-SQL, Oauth, ARM/Bicep, Xunit, Azure DevOps CI/CD & Service Connections/Hooks, and Azure B2C with strong experiences with Scrum, TDD, and SOLID & the 2 workers aren't at the same level then the one with a higher level should be paid more.
 
As a teenager my home teacher was a BYU CS professor, and he was later the department's chairman. He and I had lots of chats about things in that department. I wanted to minor in CS but they didn't have that option. I found a different department that had a combination major program and did that. I didn't waste any of my CS credits and then ended up working in the CS field. Another man in my Ward was called to be a Mission President in Canada. While he was out one of his missionaries named C from France went home at the end of 2 years and married a girl 2 weeks after getting home, he later came to BYU to do his masters/PhD in CS (when I got to meet him), and he went back to Europe to work. C came back to Provo to be a BYU CS professor for 2 decades and just left BYU recently due to getting called to the First Quorum of the Seventy this last General Conference. When he was in college he didn't seem like the type who'd become a GA as he was nerdy/quiet.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2023 04:10PM by Maude.

"In my teaching career I was “the curriculum guy”, so I spent a lot of time looking at curricula of other CS programs, and my department went through two accreditation reviews itself. The CS courses I had at BYU were IMHO clearly up to professional standards."

COMMENT: This is interesting, but it strikes me as maybe being too broad for comparison purposes with other universities. (I don't know this but am asking.)

I would expect that general programming and software engineering would be areas within a computer science curriculum that would generally be non-controversially competent among accredited university computer science departments.

However, once one gets into fields involving AI, including learning algorithms, robotics, and more controversial, cognitive science, I would expect to find a huge drop-off of scope and competence unless a university had a long tradition of such matters. (Like MIT and Stanford)

In particular, I would think that AI, with its traditional goal of simulating human cognition, would be a particularly sensitive subject matter at BYU. (I don't think Simon and Newell would have found much interest and support if they had first proposed AI at BYU!) Yet, AI has become so mainstream now, one wonders how BYU approaches such subjects. My guess is that it embraces AI on the engineering front but ignores AI as a proposed explanation of human cognition. This also seems to be the trend nationally because of AI's failure to develop algorithms that incorporate the human capacity of 'common sense' reasoning within vast multiple domains.

Any thoughts?

Henry Bemis Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "In my teaching career I was “the curriculum
> guy”, so I spent a lot of time looking at
> curricula of other CS programs, and my department
> went through two accreditation reviews itself. The
> CS courses I had at BYU were IMHO clearly up to
> professional standards."
>
> COMMENT: This is interesting, but it strikes me as
> maybe being too broad for comparison purposes with
> other universities. (I don't know this but am
> asking.)
>

Not sure you mean by too broad. There is a core set of topics that should be in a program according to the accrediting agency (ACM in this case, the professional organization of computing). CS has something of an identity problem. It is not entirely clear what belongs in CS and what is important, but really belongs to another field. That line has gotten blurrier, rather than more defined, with the passage of time.

When I started looking at other programs, I was amused/bemused to so that the Big Guns in computer science did not have accredited undergrad programs - Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT. MIT didn't even have a CS department - they had a computer emphasis in Electrical Engineering. Their basic attitude was "we'll decide what a computer science degree should mean. ACM can do their best to try and keep up." At least that was the impression I got. [This was all 35 years ago. The world has no doubt changed since then]

We were a mid-size state university, so we wanted the accreditation to show that we met the standards of an outside set of eyes. I can fully understand why that wasn't that important to say Stanford.


> I would expect that general programming and
> software engineering would be areas within a
> computer science curriculum that would generally
> be non-controversially competent among accredited
> university computer science departments.
>
Anything in the physical and mathematical is non-controversial. Ditto the Business School, and they are apparently OK with having a Law School, though it causes some problems.


> However, once one gets into fields involving AI,
> including learning algorithms, robotics, and more
> controversial, cognitive science, I would expect
> to find a huge drop-off of scope and competence
> unless a university had a long tradition of such
> matters. (Like MIT and Stanford)
>
> In particular, I would think that AI, with its
> traditional goal of simulating human cognition,
> would be a particularly sensitive subject matter
> at BYU. (I don't think Simon and Newell would
> have found much interest and support if they had
> first proposed AI at BYU!) Yet, AI has become so
> mainstream now, one wonders how BYU approaches
> such subjects. My guess is that it embraces AI on
> the engineering front but ignores AI as a proposed
> explanation of human cognition. This also seems to
> be the trend nationally because of AI's failure to
> develop algorithms that incorporate the human
> capacity of 'common sense' reasoning within vast
> multiple domains.

I took AI back in the Pleistocene (1974 as best as I recall) when it was basically looking at solving specific problems. There are superb chess playing programs, but they can't do anything else at all. Such programs would never ever even come close to passing the Turing Test.

I don't know what AI is anymore. It is apparently the buzzword of the decade. I remember when cybernetics was the buzzword. Buzzwords come and go. As far as I can tell, neural nets are how AI is progressing now. In a chess program, the smarts, so to speak, are explicitly built into the code ("if the computer sees this, it should do this" type of code). Neural nets do not work that way at all. When a neural net "knows" something, the programmer, even in theory, doesn't fully know how the net "knows" what it knows. That's a little disconcerting.

However, I can't really offer much about how AI is progressing within the discipline, or within the BYU/Mormon culture. I am too far out of the loop. My two accreditation hill climbs were 20 and 35 years ago, which suddenly makes me realize OMG, I'm old! I was early middle age 35 years ago. Gag.

Keep in mind that AI is just one facet of CS, and at the undergrad level, a relatively minor facet. There is plenty of foundational material that needs to be assimilated first.

I found the email from the CS department. I will post it under this post so the length of this post doesn't scare people. :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2023 05:05PM by Brother Of Jerry.

What the BYU CS dept thought was worth bragging about (and I agree)

Some of our recent accomplishments:
- Our competitive programming team just advanced from the North American Programming contest and is heading to the world competition in Egypt this November, 2023
- Our competitive programming team won 1st and 2nd in the regional ICPC programming contest
[BoJ note: speaking as a former programming team coach - this is a big deal.]

- Our game program was ranked #1 again by the Animation Career Review in both computer science and animation
- Animation: 20 student emmys, 6 student oscars, numerous game awards from E3 to the Rookies
- Starting Fall 2023, the Computer Science department will be offering a new emphasis in Machine Learning
- We are the fastest growing major on-campus
- The Computer Science Department has the most majors of any department on-campus

Our Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Computational Creativity and Control; Computer Networks, Systems, and Security; Data and Text Analytics; Family History Technology Laboratory; Graphics, Animation and Computer Vision; Human-Computer Interaction and Software Development

Some of our professors and students have been working on groundbreaking research, including the The RelativeFinder application developed by the Family History Technology Laboratory that reached 1 Million users. https://universe.byu.edu/2021/05/19/byu-students-help-others-connect-through-family-history-application/

Also, our Bee research breakthrough:
Buzzworthy breakthrough: BYU students utilize AI to decipher the ‘language of the bees’ - BYU News

[Note from BoJ - this is hilarious to fans of the movie Plan 10 from Outer Space, in which Karen Black, playing Nehor, reveals "the Secret of the Bees". The movie is an absurdist satire on Utah culture]

Our Current Degrees Offered:
Computer Science (BS)
Computer Science: Bioinformatics (BS)
Computer Science: Animation and Games (BS)
Computer Science: Data Science (BS)
Computer Science: Software engineering (BS)
Computer Science: Machine Learning (BS)
Computer Science (minor)
Computer Science teaching (minor)
Computer Science (MS)
Computer Science (PhD)

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
>
> There is a core set of topics that should be in a program

I agree.

My most cited work was an AI paper, genetic algorithms in particular. And it's most cited not because it was great, but because it's simply had longer to accrue citations. *shrug*

That was in the early 90's, and then I ended up in industry for a couple decades, before returning to teach for the last ten years. I think I've shared this before, but my main courses were OO programming, data structures and algorithms, but I also taught discrete math when there was a need (boolean algebra, set theory, etc).

I much prefer teaching to research, and enjoyed the course material in all of the above. Data structures and algorithms most, because it's 300 level work, and students by then are a bit more mature. OO programming was 200 level, so not quite as mature, but discrete math was worst--although I like the material--it was a 100-level class, and the students tended to be very immature (IMO).

That said, I did join some machine learning efforts near the end (I retired from teaching in '21--burnout coupled with Covid was enough for me).

TBH, I think "academia" is sort of broken, and in CS at least I think that more ground breaking and meaningful research is being done in industry.


Re. women in computing, most of my course sections were capped at 30 students, which was nice for both me and the students, but it also makes statistics pretty easy. Most sections had between zero and three women, so less than ten percent. Sadly, minority representation was even lower.

Ah, a fellow bithead. I agree that academic CS is kind of broken. That’s what I was alluding to when I said it has an identity crisis, but I didn’t go into that in more detail. I spent about half my adult life in industry, and most of the really important things I learned came from industry.

Data structures and algorithms was my fave course too, but I was mostly the machine organization and assembly language guy my early years, including OS courses from time to time. It was a small department then, and I got to teach most of our curriculum over the years. I helped create our discrete math course, then handed it off to the math department. That was when I took a senior level combinatorics math course just to hone my skills, and discovered there were substantially more women majoring in math than in CS, percentagewise.

I also took an EE course in digital signal processing, mostly Fourier analysis, when I had an industry job doing digital signal processing. I was cookbooking my way through the job, but really wanted to understand the math. That was when I discovered there were a fair number of women majoring in EE too. I also discovered that the DSP course struck fear into the hearts of the EE students. My year and a half of cookbooking meant I knew exactly where the course material was heading, plus having been a math major helped too, so I got the highest grade in the class by about 5%. The EE students tend to think that people go into CS if they aren’t smart enough to hack electrical engineering. I’m not sure if I helped debunk that attitude, or just pissed them off. :).

ETA: here I was, not even an EE major, hadn’t taken the prerequisites, and I was literally triple their age (60 versus 20). They were not particularly welcoming. In fact… The professor on the other hand was thrilled, because students had been complaining that the course was way too hard, and were trying to get him removed from the course. But if a 60 year old non-major could ace it…



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2023 01:52AM by Brother Of Jerry.

You curve breaker!

Yeah. A new experience for me. I worked like a dog in the course, but that actually succeeded. There were other courses during my undergrad years, where I worked like a dog and still got a mediocre grade (cough abstract algebra cough). That course has convinced a lot of people they would be happier in another major.

I had the same experience. The two classes that were terrifying in my undergrad major were upper division physics and quant and qual chemistry. Many micro majors I knew didn't make it through those classes.

I had learned about integrals in calculus class which I survived OK. However, when I had to actually understand them to use them in physics, that was a whole different challenge.

Thankfully, since then, I've forgotten everything I ever knew about them and more.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I agree that academic CS is
> kind of broken. That’s what I was alluding to
> when I said it has an identity crisis,

Yeah. That makes sense to me.


> most of
> the really important things I learned came from
> industry.

Same here! I had a co-op job while I was an undergrad, and worked a couple years full time before grad school. By then, I could code rings around most of my classmates. When I went back to teach all those years later, I tried to inject some industry-relevant skills into the classroom.


> having been a math major helped too,

I minored in math, mainly because I'm lazy and only one extra class was needed on top of the CS req's to get a math minor! I thought I was gonna get off easy by signing up for the history of math, but it was a killer class. We not only had to learn the history, but demonstrate it and write proofs to show that each evolutionary step was valid... By midterm I was worried about even getting a C, and I had to pass it to graduate, but the prof basically gave everyone an A. It was only Math and CS majors, anyway.


> I was mostly the machine organization and
> assembly language guy my early years,

Yikes. I never did assembly after the one required class and didn't really like it. I had to take an incomplete in the course because of a summer project. Basically missed the last project deadline and the final exam. When I took the exam later, I went in to his office to ask him about the last question I was struggling with--basically a "what does this snippet of code do?"--and I said, "I just don't see how it can work." He laughed and said that was basically the answer, that it didn't work. He graded it quickly and said I hadn't done too badly, explaining that he had made a different/harder exam for me just in case I had talked to my classmates.

Then he asked me about the last project. I'd been in to see him a couple times over the semester, and when I first got back, and he was always disorganized, couldn't find stuff, etc. I had sensed his frustration there (and knew the last thing he probably wanted to do was grade another assignment), and sensed his generosity in the moment with the exam grading, and just said, "do I have enough points for a C ?" He peeked at his grade book for a second, looked at me, shrugged and said, "yeah, I think you do." He ended up giving me a B (I guess he curved).


> so I got the highest grade in the class by about
> 5%. The EE students tend to think that people go
> into CS if they aren’t smart enough to hack
> electrical engineering. I’m not sure if I helped
> debunk that attitude, or just pissed them off. :).

Nice!

One of my frustrations in the 90's was all the EE majors who thought that because they'd had to take a Fortran class they were qualified to be software engineers! (apologies to all EE majors). TBF, many learned OTJ and became good developers (and so did many non-EE people).

In fact, one of my favorite people to work with, and one of the best developers I ever knew, was a HS dropout who was completely self-taught. He had OTJ training too, but the coolest stuff he did, he learned on his own.

"Any thoughts?"

Fit the AI hardware inside a Christus statue?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2023 04:58PM by bradley.

I'm only guessing, but in my imagination, computer science is based on something 'sciency'...  With gates being open or closed, voltage being on or off, with nothing ever in between the opposite states.  The word "Dependable" springs to mind.

In my mind, religion very much would an example of that kind of "Dependable."  But the fact that, at heart, religion is not "Dependable" hasn't stopped religions from wanting and claiming infallibility...or at least being more dependable than flipping a coin.

So it would seem to me that BYU is happy with computer science; Computer Science does not threaten it, and so they have no need to imply that there's a best way to do computer science, meaning a church way.

I would contrast the BYU Computer Science program with the BYU Egyptology program or the BYU Archaeology program...  I'm sure you get the picture I'm trying to paint.


...the above dismal attempt at seriousness was so that I could trot out my 1969 KSL weatherman Bob Welti story...  Bob Welti was hot stuff in Utah back in 1969, a very popular on-the-air personality.  One of his descriptors was "silly."  

What most didn't know then was that he was also a BYU instructor.  He was teaching a class in Ad Copywriting in the Y's Dept. of Communication, the Advertising and Public Relations division.

Copywriting isn't a science, it's a talent.  And as with any talent, many of those who are good at it wind up with critics attacking them, using negative terms and phrases, which is fine because not being a science, prejudices, leanings, and opinions can be brought to bear that can't be dismissed based on facts.  It's like one person worshipping the god particle while another dismisses it as just another grain of sand on a vast beach.

So there I was in 1969, BYU's least known and shortest Lamanite, a PIMO EQP in a ward made up of dairy farmers and other assorted adult White People, sitting in Bob Welti's Fall semester Copywriting class...  Just before Christmas break, he announced an over-the-holiday class assignment.

He said that he had arranged for a local radio station to host each one of us for a couple of hours on the weekday of our choosing to visit their studio to write advertising copy for whichever of their advertisers they chose to assign to us.

To complete the assignment, we had to turn in a copy of our ad material when we returned to class after the break.  He condescendingly told us the copy didn't have to run on the radio; he just wanted us to get a feel for the "pressure" of having to come up with X amount of copy in Y amount of time...

I called right away and made my appointment as early as I could, because my wife, baby and I were heading for Vegas ASAP.  

When I showed up at the radio station (15 minutes early because early is on time, but on time is late!), I was shown to a desk with a typewriter and was asked to write 30-second ads for a popular hamburger stand that used to sit in that triangle of land at the old entrance to the campus, at University and Cougar Blvd.

So, naturally, I wrote sexy, sleazy RM-dating-a-hot-chick-at-the-Y silly stuff with one or the other, wanting a hamburger and a milkshake over what the other one was offering.  Imagine me now, but only half as mature...  What I wrote was puerile, tawdry, juvenile, silly, and downright slutty...

I turned in my efforts at the end of the two-hour stint and went home with my copy, and then my little family took off for Las Vegas to spend the holidays at my parent's home...

At the start of the next class, Bro. Welti begins the class by lamenting that it's not a good thing to appeal to a lower common denominator when trying to reach an audience for a client because clients are noble beings, classes, and institutions deserving of our highest standards.

I'm starting to beam, because it began to dawn on me that he had taken umbrage at the fact that the lord's university had been the source of the filth and depravity that is my mind!  He seemed to be upset that someone had spent two hours of useful learning time just being so low-down silly that it didn't even come within sight of merely sophomoric.

Finally, without identifying the source, he began to read my copy, word for word, including my descriptors,

hunky RM: (deep voice, lustily) Oh, baby, you look so good!

buxom coed: (throaty, sexy) You're just saying that!

hunky RM: No!  I mean it!  You're hotter than a double-decker bacon burger from The Burger Shack!

...like that...  I don't remember any of the ads, but I do have an awareness of how tawdry they were, slutty tawdry... (Think Gladys Lot!) and back then, I was still in the full flower of my demented youth.

After he finished reading a number of my ads, he began to warm up on a thesis that clients don't appreciate being dragged through the mire, that they are all highly sentient, orderly, noble institutions...blah, blah, blah...

I recall that I was a bit disappointed by the adult point of view he was taking because I'd felt it likely that a silly guy like him would not be offended by someone else's silliness...

And then he was interrupted by some hands going up. He acknowledged one of these students, who said, kind of apologetically, "Sir, the ads you're reading...they all ran repeatedly over the Christmas Break." The others who'd had their hands up, all local residents, nodded their heads in agreement.

Bob Welti meekly asked, "They did?" while at the same time, I excitedly asked the same question, but with a hell of a lot more heat and verve!

In a way, this story serves to point out why religion in general, and mormonism in particular, cannot survive as monolithic, never-changing institutions.  

Having been created by mankind, as mankind changes, so must the institution.  

The evolution of the mind is probably a bigger factor in the development of a species compared to the evolution of the body...although the development of a prehensile penis...


1969 ... 2023  nothing has really changed.

Missing from that very enlightening post, Jesus, is any mention of compensation and, for the reruns, royalties.

What are the odds that Mr. Welti had the last laugh?

Lot's Wife Wrote:
------------------------
>
> What are the odds that
> Mr. Welti had the last
> laugh?


Not good...

He dead; me, not so much.

No comment on royalties?

Is that a sensitive topic?

Money and me...

We've heard of each other but we don't get along when we're in the same room.

Or in the same business, apparently.

What is it with White People and business!!

I prefer the simple life; tilling the soil, tending the herds...

. . . selling prurient ads to goats. . .

That's a great story, EOD! And from what you shared about one of the ads, it seemed completely cute.

If by "cute" you meant "crude", then yes.

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So it would seem to me that BYU is happy with
> computer science; Computer Science does not
> threaten it, and so they have no need to imply
> that there's a best way to do computer science,
> meaning a church way.
>
> I would contrast the BYU Computer Science program
> with the BYU Egyptology program or the BYU
> Archaeology program...  I'm sure you get the
> picture I'm trying to paint.

Exactly!

Allowing real scholarship in CS does not conflict with TSCC.

What your story illustrates is that sex sells! It may not be highbrow (as Mr. Welty would have liked) but it works quite well.

Does YBU teach Logistics?
To what level?

GNPE Wrote:
---------------------------

> Does YBU teach Logistics?


The Y sure delivered for me!

To the level of supporting intercontinental transport via wooden submarine! ;)

The 3 on KSL. Dick Norse, Bob Welti, and Paul James.

Bob Welti was silly. Everyone liked him it seemed.

I was thinking while you described what you had written that Welti would like your work. I LOVE that you got the last laugh.

I always liked him.

I got an A in the class.

At the time, I assumed he was trying to follow a mormon-approved point of view, trying to be the grownup in the room... After all, should a temple-married RM, EQP, be creating that kind of filth?


It didn't occur to me until years later regarding another alternative...

What if peoply in thrall to the church heard those ribald ads in 1969, in Provo, UT, and complained to the radio station and/or the burger joint?

If head honchos at either or both of the businesses, after getting complaints, worried about mormonish repercussions, and "looked into the situation," they might have found some relief in the fact that, "...Hey, these ads were written by a student of Bro. Robert D. Welti (the name he'd have used if he'd had a career in the church..)!! Tell all those complainers this!!

And so they did, making a few fatuous, smirking, self-satisfied MFMs call Bro. Welti directly to let him know that they, and the Lord, were furious with him!! 

How dare The Center of the Universe, Provo, Utah, and specifically, the Lord's very own University, be subjected to such unhallowed smut!

Can you imagine what might have happened to me had not Bro. Bob shielded me from their umbrage?

Anyway, that's the version I like.

I don't know much about Computer Science.


I know/acquainted with a Lady who is a professor at BYU. She is a Professor of Computer Science and I think focuses on AI.

That's about all I know about BYU and CS.

There is both academic tension and ambiguity in the terms "computer science" "artificial intelligence" and "cognitive science." This can be seen from a quote by Douglas Hofstadter in the Preface to his book, *Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies* (1995)

He states: [With my own comments in brackets]

"It all began in 1977, when I became an assistant professor of computer science at Indiana University and officially started doing research in artificial intelligence."

[This represents the traditional association of AI with computer science, even though previously, as you note, AI was a sort of renegade discipline outside even computer science.]

"A word on the term "artificial intelligence" . . . In the 1970s, I enthusiastically embraced this provocative phrase (or its acronym, "AI") as a good way of describing my field of research and my own goals. For me and probably for a good many people, the term conjured up an exciting image -- that of questing after the deepest secrets of the human mind and expressing them as pure, abstract patterns."

[This was the traditional orientation of AI, as equating human 'thinking' and problem solving with computation.]

"In the early 1980s, however, that term, as words are wont to do, gradually started changing connotations, and began to exude the flavor of commercial applications and expert systems, as opposed to basic scientific research about the nature of thinking and being conscious. Then, even worse, it slid down the slope that ends up in meaningless buzzwords and empty hype."

[What DH doesn't say is that this shift in AI away from modeling human thinking and cognition to data driven computation of "expert systems," was in large part a development from the failure of AI (particularly the difficulties in modeling common sense as associated with the so-called frame problem.]

"As a result I came to feel much less comfortable saying or writing "AI." Luckily, a new term was just then coming into currency -- "cognitive science" -- and I started to favor that way of describing my research interests, since it clearly stresses the idea of fidelity to what actually goes on in the human mind/brain, as well as the pure-science nature of the endeavor. Nowadays, I seldom call myself an "artificial-intelligence researcher" any more, choosing instead to say that I am a cognitive scientist."

["Cognitive science" is essentially the science of human cognition, and encompasses three main academic interests, psychology, neuroscience, and the DH orientation of AI (the mind and human cognition as mechanized computation.]

Now, I state all of the above to return to the question as to whether and to what extent BYU embraces cognitive science, and its related principles of psychology, neuroscience, and AI.
Here is the advertised BYU program:

https://psychology.byu.edu/cognitive-and-behavioral-neuroscience-psychology-phd

Notice first that it is in the psychology department, rather than the computer science department, which suggests to me that AI is not emphasized within the psychology of cognitive science. (AI is in the computer science department.) In any event, the standard starting assumption of ALL cognitive science research is Crick's hypothesis, which states:

"The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

My question is this: How in the world does the cognitive science department at BYU navigate this assumption within the theological constraints of Mormonism? Modern psychology, neuroscience, and traditional AI are manifestly opposed to any view of human beings as embodied "souls" destined for eternal life.

Can anyone on RfM comment on *this* question?