The 2026-’27 academic year will begin with courses being offered in a new major in artificial intelligence in the UC Santa Barbara Computer Science (CS) Department. The major is a response to student and industry demand, in addition to announcements at both federal and state levels in the past few years suggesting that the United States needs to move ever more forcefully into the AI space. 

The CS department responded in the form of a proposal for a new Bachelor of Science degree program, developed primarily by CS professor Tevfik Bultan, teaching professor and department vice chair, Diba Mirza, and CS department chair and distinguished professor, Divy Agrawal. The proposal was submitted in fall 2024,and was approved by the UCSB Academic Senate in January 2026, following near-unanimous approval by the Faculty Legislature earlier in January. The proposal had been endorsed by UCSB chancellor, Dennis Assanis, and approved by the Undergraduate Council. 

“The origin of artificial Intelligence can be traced back to Alan Turing’s famous question, ‘Can machines think?’ which he posed in 1950 in his classic treatise ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence,’” says Agrawal. “It has taken nearly three-quarters of a century of technological advancements in AI to start to answer this question, and to arrive at an inflection point when AI begins to profoundly transform society. Over the next seventy-five years, AI will be integrated increasingly into all aspects of life, a process that will require future generations of scientists and engineers who are well-versed in AI technologies and able to push the frontiers of knowledge. The Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence curriculum at UCSB is designed to achieve precisely this goal.”

Bultan, who proposed the idea of establishing a new degree in AI to Agrawal and Mirza about two years ago, notes, “Artificial intelligence is the most recent computing revolution that is causing drastic changes to human civilization. Advances in statistical machine learning and deep neural networks have significantly broadened the scope of problems that can be addressed by computing and AI. The new degree will enable us to provide in-depth education to our students in these rapidly progressing areas. I am particularly excited to see the interdisciplinary education and research opportunities that the new degree will create across the College of Engineering and UCSB, since artificial intelligence can be applied in any area of study. Two years of effort, and strong collaboration among our outstanding faculty across the college and the campus, enabled us to develop an exceptionally strong undergraduate program. I am very excited for our prospective students in artificial intelligence.” 

Mirza, too, sees an enormous possibility for AI students. “I am excited that the BS in AI will bring together students who are passionate about shaping the future of artificial intelligence,” she says. “This major enables them to tackle a broad range of interdisciplinary problems by working alongside faculty whose research spans AI security and systems, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, cognitive science, and the ethical dimensions of AI. Our goal is to give students a rigorous foundation and to help them develop the innovative mindset needed to drive the field forward and in the right direction. I strongly believe that UCSB's collaborative and close-knit community offers the perfect environment to create the next generation of AI leaders.”

The federal case for AI action was laid out in April 2024, when President Joe Biden received a report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology titled “Supercharging Research: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Meet Global Challenges.” It included a passage that read, “The United States must act boldly and thoughtfully to maintain our nation’s lead in research in the innovative applications of AI, and in establishing frameworks and norms for the safe and responsible use of AI.”  

A later report suggested, “If the United States Government does not act with responsible speed and in partnership with industry, civil society, and academia to make use of AI capabilities in service of the national-security mission and to ensure the safety, security, and trustworthiness of American AI innovation writ large, it risks losing ground to strategic competitors.” 

Closer to home, Governor Newsom wrote, in fall 2023, “California is the most populous, diverse state in the nation and a global technology leader uniquely situated to lead the world in responsibly developing, implementing, and governing GenAI [generative AI], by combining the strengths of California's world-class tech industry, universities, economy, and workforce.” Some of that workforce, of course, is trained in The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering at UCSB.

The proposal to the UCSB Academic Senate asserted, “To adequately meet the educational and societal demands of the AI discipline and to disseminate its fast-growing and highly impactful body of knowledge, a BS degree in AI must have different requirements than a CS degree and, as such, should be recognized as a separate degree.”
 
Coursework for the new degree, expected to begin in the Fall quarter for 2026, will reflect the need for specific training and be broken down into three main areas:

• AI Foundations, including Computing and AI Principles, Statistics, and Optimization. This portion of the major comprises lower-division courses based on existing CS, MATH, and Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) courses. It will include one new course and one new seminar.
• Domain-Specific Coursework, Including Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Deep Learning. This portion will consist of required upper-division coursework based on existing CS and ECE AI courses, plus two new AI-specific courses.
• Field Electives in AI and Related Areas Offered in Engineering and the Humanities. This component will include two new courses plus, importantly in terms of application, a capstone sequence, which will leverage the CS department's expertise gained from the CS capstone project sequence.

“Artificial intelligence has rapidly risen to become perhaps the most important technological advancement of this decade, so it is fitting that UCSB, which has already built an impressive collection of entities around AI, now has a major dedicated to the subject,” said Umesh Mishra, Dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering at UCSB. “AI holds the promise of immense possibility to do good; yet, it also requires abundant care to ensure that it is used responsibly and does no harm. This burgeoning field will require an abundance of people who have the specialized training to develop and maintain AI platforms that will operate to benefit all people.”

Dean Mishra often emphasizes the importance of not trying to lead the world in everything, but rather to choose areas of existing strength and to focus on achieving first-rate excellence in them. CS at UCSB — and the AI and ML components, in particular — reflect the tremendous departmental gains made over the past couple of decades. It has seen a five-fold growth in applications for the existing CS BS degree, while the past decade alone has seen a five-fold increase in AI courses offered by the CS Department.

Students in the degree program will also have the benefit of access to the growing number of initiatives and research centers on AI across the UCSB campus. They include: 

• The Center for Responsible Machine Learning (CRML)
• The NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION)
• The Data Science Initiative
• The Mellichamp Initiative in Mind and Machine Intelligence
• The Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) 

About twenty freshmen are projected to enroll in the major next fall, with increases each year so that, by 2029, some two hundred students will be working their way through various phases of the major.