Why future journalists, biologists and farmers need more maths: Q&A with Professor Anton van den Hengel
Professor Anton van den Hengel, Director of AIML
It’s the time of year when high school and university students are having to lock in their subjects for 2021 and beyond. Particularly for those looking down the barrel of year 12, there’s a temptation to choose subjects that might reliably deliver a high final mark. But is that the best idea? We asked Professor Anton van den Hengel, Director, Australian Institute for Machine Learning.
What do you advise students when they’re choosing subjects?
My advice to students in general is to do more maths.
There’s an idea out there that maths is hard and doesn’t gain you much. The truth is, that maths is hard and gains you everything.
Maths teaches a rigour in thinking and provides experience in a wide range of problem solving skills, but more than that it demonstrates that you can do it. The maths assessment process is far more metric than most subject assessment methodologies, and it’s thus a better indicator of problem solving capacity than anything else I can think of.
It doesn’t matter what field you want to go into, more maths is always a good thing. Computational biology is really taking off, data journalists are in short supply, and agriculture is desperate for better mathematical models.
Do you need to be a maths whiz to study AI and machine learning?
You don’t actually need all that much university maths to do machine learning.
The more maths you have the better, but as long as you can program you will be fine. Programming skills can have a similar impact to maths skills.
Computers are the primary tool of our times, and being an expert make you very powerful.
What about students looking to commit to postgraduate studies?
The advice to do more maths and programming is good because it’s general, but beyond that I’d suggest that students should pick a supervisor more on the basis of their achievements than their familiarity.
They should pick a group, and a supervisor that is making a lot of progress and doing great research. Doing so will mean that they are joining a team that has momentum and knows how to generate strong publications. By joining such a group the student gets a huge advantage, and is far more likely to be successful. There’s a feedback loop, where being a little more successful at the beginning makes a huge difference in the end.
Story written by Dr Sarah Keenihan, AIML