The College of Engineering will offer a new Artificial Intelligence major to a selection of incoming computer science students starting fall 2026. The major will be available to all applicants for the 2027-28 academic year.
The College of Engineering will offer a new AI major to incoming CS students starting fall 2026. Sarah Caulder / Daily Nexus
The major’s proposal was submitted in fall 2024 and developed by computer science (CS) professor Tevfik Bultan, CS teaching professor and Department Vice Chair Diba Mirza and CS Department Chair and distinguished professor Divyakant Agrawal. The Academic Senate approved the proposal in January, making UC Santa Barbara the second UC to offer an Artificial Intelligence (AI) major, following UC San Diego.
The new major will consist of interdisciplinary electives, existing CS courses and six new AI-centric courses, including an ethics course. Agrawal emphasized the importance of a required ethics course in the hopes that future AI developers consider their technologies’ possible societal impacts.
“The ethics course is important because AI is going to have [an] immediate impact on the societal context, and it is important for the people who are designing the system or developing the system to understand the impact that can happen,” Agrawal said.
Future AI students are expected to become proficient in building AI programs and Large Language Models (LLM), a type of AI algorithm. Agrawal emphasized that students will be able to apply their degree in various fields including CS, healthcare and finance.
“We are thinking about training the next generation of technology workforce who are going to be engaged in these technologies,” Agrawal said.
Agrawal said the only additional technology they requested for use in new major courses is a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) cluster, or a network of interconnected GPUs that work in parallel to execute complex computations.
Additionally, they have requested an increased number of staff advisors for the College of Engineering to support students.
“I think that student advising is one of the most foundational pieces of undergraduate education,” Agrawal said.
In recent years, AI has been critiqued by environmental activists for its greenhouse gas emissions and extensive energy consumption. Data centers also use large amounts of water for cooling, with large data centers using up to five million gallons every day.
Agrawal said the “whole point” of training students in AI is to increase the technology’s efficiency in hopes of decreasing data center environmental impacts.
“We are going to point out the inefficiencies of the current system and make it more efficient,” Agrawal said. “To make these systems more power efficient, so that you don’t have … large-scale environmental consequences.”
A version of this article appeared on p. 1 of the Feb. 26, 2026 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
The College of Engineering will offer a new AI major to incoming CS students starting fall 2026. Sarah Caulder / Daily Nexus
