Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages(elementsofai.com) |
Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages(elementsofai.com) |
It's as if there wasn't enough of snake oil salesman promoting their business as "AI-powered" already. And what AI does even mean in current context? A bag of machine learning algorithms? I always likened AI to be more of general AI rather than how it's nowadays labelled.
I would argue against this course having no benefits. There is a huge disconnect between what the reality of the near-future in tech is and what the media mis-represent it to be, often fuelled by interviews and quotes from the people directly benefiting from stoking the fire.
The general populace being much closer to a position to understand that it's actually largely unrealistic or nonsense is the right way to go about bridging the gap between the "tech class" and your average lay person.
I definitely agree that society in general would be better if people had better grasp of statistics and how they are manipulated and mis-represented to them, but there are so many interest areas that people would be better off for having some understanding of that I don't think any one can be discredited just because it's not one of the others.
If it takes hype, advertising and buzz-words to do that, I'm ok with that.
It was well received by the Finnish general populace.
The Finnish government currently acts as the EU presidency, and decided to open access to all Europeans.
While I didn't have the time to complete it, their fullstack course seems also very good, has someone completed it that can share their experience?.
Haven't done the full-stack course but it seemed ok, it irks me a little bit that it's still in JavaScript but oh well, you can't have it all.
Today's announcement means more translations in European languauges.
I wonder how many people criticizing it even planned on trying this completely-free course.
I think we really need to work on pulling the plug on this fetishization of contrarianism as a community.
Its Finnish EU PRESIDENCY, which means it's paid by the EU budget.
Each EU country holds the rotating EU presidency for six months, which means they chair interministerial meetings, formally negotiate and propose compromise legal texts, etc. In this role the presidency receives a budget for promotional events, communication efforts, etc. The Finnish presidency decided to use part of the budget for this translation effort.
This seems to fit various EU goals well, eg to upskill the population, promote digital competences and encourage use of all 24 EU languages. Think of just the added value of having common terminology and definitions.
At least the language dropdown seems to be intelligable in all languages.
Compared to getting stuck in google maps in, say, Russia, where even the 'change language' menu item is in Russian, so of course you can't even find it to change to English unless you can read Russian, or happen to know where itt is already.
An AI course targeted at Europe should at least include German, French, Spanish, etc.
In the linked article, it states that the course will be available "in all official EU languages", which is indeed the case. The word "official" has been removed from the title, thus giving a very different indication of the actual set of languages in question.
Quote from website: "The Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU has decided to invest in people’s future skills and will make the Elements of AI online course freely available in all official EU languages."
As a staunch partisan for the unity of the EU, and native Catalan speaker, I cannot but feel dismay about this continuous lack of tact from my institutions. I know this is due to ignorance more than malice, but it really looks as if the institutions are purposely shadowing our very existence.
[1] https://eu2019.fi/en/article/-/asset_publisher/suomen-eu-puh...
Not every national language of EU member states is an EU official language. Luxembourgish and Turkish are national languages of Luxembourg and Cyprus respectively but are not EU official languages.
EU official languages are specified by the EU treaties. In cases of enlargement, they are negotiated between the EU and the acceding state. When Cyprus joined the EU, Cyprus and the EU agreed that Turkish would not be added to the list of EU official languages.
(Also, the fact that Turkish is a minority language in BiH is of little relevance. BiH is not an EU member state, and most minority languages of EU member states are not EU official languages either.)
I was surprised when I worked in Milan how little English my fellow teammates spoke.
They could have left the country out completely and if you just ignore the country then it works fine.
What is weirder (but not the first time I have seen it) is that the list of languages is sorted by country name. German comes before Danish and Dutch after Maltese.
Also "English (Ireland)" heh
For everyone else, use a VPN, I doubt they check anything.
I guess it's just that landing page :)
I would agree with your point, having a Catalan version would be more impactful.
I mean, there's no other language appropriate for working with modern computers (Russian is probably the closest second)[0], but the level of English computer programs require of you, especially cushioned ones like they're exposing to people in this case, tends to be less than native understanding of the language.
[0]: English has a huge advantage because typesetting, typewriting, liberalism, and empire had already greatly simplified the writing system by the time computers were standardizing. It was, from the start of electronic computing, basically trivial to typeset English with simple character series, in a readable form. Anglo typewriting and typesetting conventions were already such that monospaced typewritten ASCII makes decent documents on its own.
With that said, if catalan was added, would you actually use that instead of english for a course like this?
I agree 100% with this. My intention is not to criticize the organizers of this course that made a very reasonable choice. The problem here is the rather absurdl (in my view) selection of official EU language. It would make more sense to me to declare English the sole official language of the union. This would not favor any big country now that the UK is out.
> With that said, if catalan was added, would you actually use that instead of english for a course like this?
Of course! I use all my software localized into catalan, even vim! Now, for technical documentation it is rare to find much in my language, almost everything is in english only. If this (quite serious) course was translated I would be even happier to follow it (but I might do it anyway if it was english only, as I'm used to it).
Quote from the press release: The cost of the initiative, a total of 1 679 000 euros, will be funded from the budget of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland.
What's news here is the translation job to translate it to multiple European languages. It takes an additional 1,7 million € and is funded solely by the Ministry of Employment and the Economy of Finland.
I failed to find any claims of EU funding any part of the original development or this translation job. The Finnish Ministry of Employment calls this course a gift from Finland to the European Union. What's your source on this being EU funded?
I am not a native English speaker. I am not very talented when it comes to learning languages. It took me many years to be able to understand written and spoken English. Still I am very grateful that once I got there the whole world is open to me. I can read every important publication, participate in discussions and read code other people write. Doing it in my native language is just putting artificial barriers out there. It doesn't make sense. Learning about computer science in my native language just makes it less efficient and introduce problems like quality of the translation or terms lacking necessary context and usage patterns (as there is less published in that language).
I feel efforts to translate to other European languages will be detrimental to general level of education and communication in future businesses. Publish only in English, it forces people to learn it. It's better for everyone in the end. If you know you had to learn it to be a competent programmer or scientist or other IT specialist you will and by doing so you will contribute to removing barriers that exist in EU which Americans don't have to deal with. I believe it's one of the big advantages US IT sector has over Europeans.
And while you are at it, why not read the material in English in the first place? That way you are using the correct terminology.
My mother tongue is Dutch, and all my systems run in English. The silly words people come up with translating things to their own language is weird and confusing. I remember Excel having Dutch translations for their functions. WTF!?!?! Try to guess the Dutch version of things you already know.
You are working in the technology industry, learn English! (not directed at the above poster :))
What about the tools that they use? do you get german translations for all those popular python-libraries?
How do you handle scientific papers? are those also translated, or do you only look at german research at german univiersities?
I would think that it would be pretty non-controversial to say that english is the lingua-franca of science today.
With that said, I could argue against myself in saying that it's nice of elementsofai to use as many languages as possible since this might be of use to people who are still far from university-level.
As someone that graduated during the 90's, and had graphics programming as one of my main focus, there were plenty of German only papers out of Darmstadt.
We had a couple of proceedings books with them on our university library.