Admissions Requirements

Program Overview

The Program offers the Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Science degrees. Students may 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.

Requirements for Application

Briefly, an application consists of the standard School of Computing and Information admission forms, available online or in hard copy, 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 relevant 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 familiar with your accomplishments. At least one should be familiar with the field of intelligent systems.
• Official transcripts of all previous undergraduate and graduate study. We require you to upload copies of your undergraduate transcripts to ApplyYourself.
• Graduate Record Examination (GRE) or any other standardized tests in lieu of it, as a way to ensure that the applicant has reasonable skills needed to undertake our advanced degree, are required to be submitted by applicants. We do not have a minimum cutoff or such for GRE or related tests. The GRE is just one of many aspects that will be taken into consideration when evaluating an applicant. If an applicant does not have the GREs already taken, it does not bar them from applying to our program if they have other research papers or such that can provide evidence of their verbal, analytical, and mathematical skills. While applications are considered not complete until scores have been received, they will still be evaluated if other strong evidence of research, analytical and writing skills are provided in other parts of the application.
• For applicants who are not native speakers of English, TOEFL scores are required. All students need to submit a TOEFL – or the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) or Duolingo English Test are also accepted. The minimum TOEFL score of 90 (Band 7 in IELTS or 115 in Duolingo English Test) in total with a minimum 22 (6.5 in IELTS) in each section is required for applying for the ISP program.

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 Department of Biomedical Informatics in addition to submitting an application to the Intelligent Systems Program.