The ML / probabilistic AI people think they're the latest and greatest, so they don't talk to anyone else, certainly not the GOFAI people, and especially not the statistics department.
Heh-heh.
Yesterday I was telling my co-worker that veered off-track in my CS education because I chose a mentor who practiced GOFAI, whereas my peers who worked on ML were much better oriented to a rewarding career in computer intelligence.
I'm confused when you say that "ML / probabilistic AI people" don't talk to the statistics department, though. ML is all about statistics. Maybe the statisticians don't talk to the ML researches because statisticians care more about manufacturing, medicine, and math then they care about AI.
I was confused too and still am. But the core ML course in my CS department gave a list of other "related courses" at the end of the course. Despite the fact that our Stats department has umpteen learning-related courses, not one of the courses on that list was in Stats.
In my experience the "not talking" definitely originates from the ML side, although there's probably some of it in both directions.
The first course in the Stats learning sequence had a tongue-in-cheek listing of differences between it and the CS learning course:
