Admission Requirements

Program Overview

The Program offers the Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Science degrees. Students have the opportunity to pursue either the broader area of artificial intelligence or the specialized track in biomedical informatics. Both are geared toward providing students opportunities to pursue advanced education and research in areas such as:

• Formal studies of learning and reasoning, including default reasoning and induction, reasoning with uncertain information, machine learning, planning, machine diagnosis, human cognition, and applications of these theories.

• Experimental testing and validation of systems in applications such as diagnosis and planning.

• The nature of interactions between people and information processing tools ranging along the spectrum of tutors (human or computer), diagnosis machines, databases, and programming environments.

• Case-based reasoning, and applications of case-based reasoning, especially in legal domains and in tutoring applications.

• Computational linguistics, and especially natural language understanding, understanding of discourse and discourse pragmatics, and dialog systems.

• Technologies related to the above foci, such as expert systems, knowledge management, case-based reasoning, or machine learning.

Who Should Apply

The admissions committee is looking for students with strong research potential. Recognizing that people can come to this field in many ways, we invite applicants from a wide variety of educational settings and disciplinary backgrounds. We do look for evidence of advanced standing and outstanding performance in some of the core areas relevant to the study of intelligent systems, including theoretical and applied computer science, cognitive psychology, other areas of cognitive science, and symbolic programming and software engineering. A B.A. or B.S. degree in one of these areas provide good preperation for entering the program.

Requirements for Application

Briefly, an application consists of the standard School of Arts and Sciences admission forms, available online or in hardcopy, together with the following materials:

• A concise statement of purpose, providing information on the following points:
• objective in pursuing a PhD or MS in intelligent systems
• theoretical background in relevent areas
• background in relevant tools and applications, particularly programming languages, including your level of proficiency
• relevant practical experience, including industrial or commercial experience
• Recommendations provided by three persons each familiar with your accomplishments. At least one should be familiar with the field of intelligent systems.
• Copies of transcripts of all previous undergraduate and graduate study.
• Graduate Record Examination general test scores are required of all applicants; applications are not complete until scores have been received.
• For applicants who are not native speakers of English, TOEFL scores are required.

Applicants interested in Biomedical Informatics

Applicants to the Biomedical Informatics track of the Intelligent Systems Program must specifically indicate their interest in this track on their application to the Intelligent Systems Program. They must also submit an application to the Center for Biomedical Informatics in addition to submitting an application to the Intelligent Systems Program.