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Chris Ahrendt Interview

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For this project we chose to interview a current professor of mathematics, Dr. Chris Ahrendt. Dr. Ahrendt is one of our former professors and teaches at the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire. As students we were impressed by his overall knowledge and enthusiasm for mathematics. This lead us to inquire into the source of his excitement and his experience in the field of mathematics. Dr. Chris Ahrendt has an educational background in both mathematics and computer science. His doctorate degree was earned through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This directed his interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Throughout the interview we learned more about Dr. Ahrendt’s practical experience and ability to tangibly connect mathematics …show more content…

Dr. Ahrendt had good math professors in college who encouraged him to continue on. He had a natural ability for analysis which also sparked his interest with programming. However, abstract mathematics was a harder area for him and he hasn’t focused on it much. Are technology and mathematics related? Dr. Ahrendt replied with an absolute, “yes!” Dr. Ahrendt then further explained how you can’t have one without the other and that “math fuels technology.” More specifically, math is driven by patterns and technology builds off these patterns. What do you predict is the career outlook for careers in math with advancements in technology? Dr. Ahrendt thought the career outlook is very good! This is because the word is always in need of good teachers/professors and because technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate. With these reasons combined, Dr. Ahrendt predicts a great career deficit in the field of mathematics. Are you involved in any research? Dr. Ahrendt responded to this question by saying how interested he was in the area of inter-program as well as artificial intelligence. He enjoys researching both of these areas. He went on to say, “It’s really like when you hear these narrow networks, deep learning, it’s all just the fancy mathematics. That kind of just for applied technology, math …show more content…

Dr. Ahrendt told us “it just sparked my interest-- in my time here at UW Eau Claire I’ve done a lot of research projects with undergraduates.” He also mentioned that he has done many different research projects both within his degree and outside of it, including meteorology. “Right now I’m interested in machine learning because I didn’t know anything about it.” How has the field [of machine learning] evolved over the last 10 years? Dr. Ahrendt noted the huge advancements that have been made over the last decade, but made sure to note that the math behind AI and machine learning is quite old mathematics. “Now that we can compute things so quickly… we can see the bloom of AI and machine learning.” What are some common misconceptions with A.I.? “I think lots! In specific tasks, AI can perform better than humans but no AI can perform better than humans at all tasks. There’s this misconception that AI is going to take over the world or something like that but not as what it is right now.” Dr. Ahrendt mentioned that in the future we could get to that point, but it is impossible to speculate with any degree of

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