Artificial Intelligence Competencies for Data Science Undergraduate Curricula

In August 2017, the ACM Education Council initiated a task force to add to the broad, interdisciplinary conversation on data science, with an articulation of the role of computing discipline-specific contributions to this emerging field. Specifically, the task force is seeking to define what the computing contributions are to this new field, in order to provide guidance for computer science or similar departments offering data science programs of study at the undergraduate level. The ACM Data Science Task Force has completed the initial draft of a curricular report. The computing-knowledge areas identified in the report are drawn from across computing disciplines and include several sub-areas of AI. This short paper describes the overall project, highlights AI-relevant areas, and seeks to open a dialog about the AI competencies that are to be considered central to a data science undergraduate curriculum.