Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (Taught)

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.

• You can choose to study this course as either an MA or an MSc.

• You will be taught by world-leading researchers in our Centre for Cognition, Computation and Modelling and in the field.

• Our School of Psychological Sciences and computer science and philosophy teams contribute to this interdisciplinary course.

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 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 two 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 on an experimental or computational project that has generated new data.

Highlights

• We have an outstanding research tradition in psychological sciences, with an international reputation in all aspects of cognitive neuroscience.

• You will have the opportunity to attend research seminars and meet and network with world-class researchers at leading research centres and institutes at Birkbeck and in the Bloomsbury area.

• In the 2023 National Student Survey, Birkbeck's School of Psychological Sciences ranked 5th in the UK for teaching.

• We are consistently regarded as one of the top instititutions teaching psychological sciences in the UK. In the most recent 2021 Research Excellence Framework, and for the third time, we were ranked in the top ten universities in the UK.

• ESRC funding may be available in conjunction with PhD study.

Careers and employability

On successfully graduating from this course, you'll have developed an array of transferable skills, including in:

• critical reading

• writing argument-based pieces

• the ability to critically evaluate AI and other computational systems

• understanding the history of intelligence research

• coding/programming skills in a common language, with specific relevance to AI and machine learning.

Graduates can pursue career paths in behavioural and psychological sciences and other disciplines in which computer simulation is used, such as in data science and social policy. Possible professions include:

• scientific researcher

• data scientist

• AI scientist

• policy adviser

• higher education lecturer.