Hello,
I’m a freshman at the University of Southern California currently studying Computational Neuroscience with a planned minor in Computer Science. My goal is to research and develop artificial intelligence; is this a good path to do so? Would I be better off switching into the Viterbi College of Engineering and just majoring in Computer Science, perhaps with a minor in neuroscience?
Thanks!
I’d go with the CS major. A few things in AI are loosely analogous to neuroscience, but you don’t really need to know anything about neuroscience to do AI. It’s almost all CS, math and statistics.
+1 to the above. Many times neuroscientists complain that AI work doesn’t utilize their field enough, so a knowledge of both can be useful, but the field doing the day to day work on it is computer science. Neuroscience often lends interesting ideas to that end but is by far the secondary field in terms of current use in AI. I’m sure there are neuroscientists who would argue that should shift a bit.
Hi, I just graduated from USC with a degree in computational linguistics not too long ago. While not exactly neuroscience, I can tell you some of my experiences. In LING 285 (Human Language and Technology), the professor basically stated that speech recognition is pure statistics. It has very little to do with an actual understanding of how the human mouth produces sounds - this is why it is not perfect. Voice recognition like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and whatnot have gotten really good, but linguists believe that if the CS people actually cared more about the linguistics component, it would be even better. I also took a graduate course in machine learning (in the linguistics department though) and on the first day, the professor made fun of Google Translate 
We had a lot of foreign students and the Chinese speakers stated that Translate completely butchered prepositions in their language, but that it otherwise captured the intended meaning.
TLDR: if you want to learn about the human brain and how it works, I’d go with the computational neuroscience major. If you want to go into AI, I agree with what has been said above. AI is basically computer science/math and the “brain” just so happens to be the focus. There’s really next to no need to understand how it works.
I can’t help your question at all, but when my kid toured USC a few yaers ago we came across this research project by Maja Mataric and I threated to go back to college with my kid just so I could work on it, it looked so cool. It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, but it does seem Viterbi has a lot of focus on AI (as does everyone these days I guess…)
@CaliDad2020 Human/Robot interaction is not AI work - it’s more of a combo of robotics, psychology, and sociology.
USC is a good for AI, but it’s not related to that program you linked.
@PengsPhils Yeah, I know - but Dr. Mataric is an AI Phd, though, I think they said (been a minute since the tour.) I was just being a random fan-boy, because I want to start my second career as a roboticist… or whatever they’re called. I blame Ultraman. Or Astroboy. Or Both.
@CaliDad2020 Gotcha 
@PengsPhils that’s problem with social media - anyone can chime in, even when I know nothing of the subject and have nothing to add!
The good news is you all know what your talking about.
Hi, I got my bachelor of cs from USC and am attending USC again for my cs master. My suggestion for your AI interest is to pursue a CS career path. You can develop computer science knowledge, both theoretically and practically, in depth.