Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence MA

Birkbeck, University of London

This postgraduate cognitive science and artificial intelligence course gives you the opportunity to focus on understanding intelligence across humans, machines and other agents. You will grapple with compelling questions such as, what is intelligence? How important is having a brain for having intelligence? What are the limits, dangers and values of artificial intelligence? Why choose this course? This course is designed for graduates of computational sciences, engineering, philosophy or behavioural and psychological sciences, and is an ideal foundation if you are interested in a research career in the cognitive sciences. Depending on your interests and career aspirations, you can choose to study this course as either an MA or an MSc. It is a core initiative of Birkbeck’s Centre for Cognition, Computation and Modelling and you will be taught by world-leading researchers in the field. Our School of Psychological Sciences contributes to this interdisciplinary course which also benefits from co-teaching with the computer science and philosophy teams to help ensure you receive the highest levels of expertise. What you will learn This course allows you to study the cognitive processes and representations underlying human thought, knowledge and behaviour. It integrates a wide range of disciplines and methodologies with the core assumption that human cognition is a computational process, implemented in neural hardware. Key topics include: the nature of computational explanation; general principles of cognition; methodology of computational modelling; theories of the cognitive architecture; symbol systems; AI; neural computation; Bayesian approaches; case studies in computational cognitive modelling; ethics of AI. You will be able to follow your interests with option modules emphasising cognitive neuroscience, AI and data science, or philosophy and ethics. You will gain from intensive training in experimental design and methodology and will build computational models and carry out a substantial piece of original research. How you will learn This course is available to study full- or part-time. It is taught through lectures and seminars with classes taking place mostly during the daytime, which may help you organise this as a day study release from work. Please note, however, that three of the compulsory modules are taught only in the evening. You will complete the MA by undertaking a dissertation based on a critical scholarship of existing published works. The MSc requires you to write a dissertation report on an experimental or computational project that has generated new data.