Taylor Launches New Bachelor’s Degree in AI and Machine Learning

Source Domain: www.taylor.edu

When artificial intelligence became the defining conversation in higher education, Taylor University was not scrambling to catch up. It was already there.

Taylor’s Computer Science & Engineering Department has been engaged with AI since the mid-1980s. Faculty members have taught courses in introductory AI, expert systems, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing across four decades and multiple cycles of the technology’s rise and retreat. This fall, that long commitment will take a new form: Taylor is launching a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, a dedicated major designed to prepare students not just to work in AI but to lead its development with technical depth, ethical clarity, and a distinctly Christian understanding of what the technology should—and should not—do.

“AI isn’t new,” said Dr. Art White, Computer Science & Engineering professor emeritus who taught at Taylor for 39 years. “In the mid 1980s, the Computer Science Department was experimenting with expert systems, and machine learning was first taught at Taylor in the early 1990s. In fact, many of the foundational machine learning concepts were present in the 1990s. Eventually, the prevalence of the Internet and GPUs provided data and computing power and opened up doors to do even more.”

That history is precisely the point. Where other institutions have rushed to build academic AI programs in response to the sudden visibility of large language models, Taylor’s program emerged from two years of…

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