The Singularity Institute Blog

The Artificial Brain Laboratory at Xiamen University has announced a three-week summer school in Artificial General Intelligence, June 22 to July 10, 2009.

The course is aimed at graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, although it may also be appropriate for some advanced undergraduates and independent or industry researchers.

Instructors are international researchers experienced in various areas of Artificial General Intelligence and related fields, among them Dr. Ben Goertzel, SIAI Director of Research; and Dr. Joel Pitt, whom SIAI has engaged to work on the OpenCog project.

More information and registration details here.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel is co-organizing a Workshop on Machine Consciousness, which will be held in Hong Kong in June 2009.

It is colocated with a larger, interdisciplinary conference on consciousness research, Toward a Science of Consciousness 2009.

Note also that the date for submitting papers to AGI-09 has been extended, by popular demand, till November 12. AGI-09 will welcome quality papers on any strong-AI related topics.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel reports on his participation in a recent workshop.

“I just returned from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where I attended a weekend workshop on Evaluation and Metrics for Human-Level AI, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and co-chaired by John Laird from the University of Michigan (who is a leader of the SOAR project, a long-standing project aimed at human-level AI, and pursued both in academia and, via Soartech, in industry) and Pat Langley from Arizona State University (who has a long and diverse history of achievement in the AI field, and has recently introduced the Icarus integrative AI system).

“Rather than a typical academic workshop focused on the presenting of papers, this was a ‘working workshop’ devoted to discussions aimed at collectively generating and filtering ideas regarding appropriate environments and tasks for software systems aimed at human-level AI. There will likely be a followup workshop early next year, focused more tightly on the description of specific environments and tasks; this one was more of a careful exploration of the relevant conceptual landscape, and a review of various requirements to be fulfilled and pitfalls to be avoided.

“Joscha Bach (creater of the MicroPsi AGI system) and I were the most radical optimists present, both of us believing it likely that with sufficient dedication of resources, human-level AI could plausibly be created within a decade. Most of the other participants believed it would take longer — but all considered human-level AI a valid and important area on which to focus current research attention.

“Among many other topics, there was some discussion of my proposal of an ‘AGI Preschool,’ which is summarized in ‘Intelligence Assessment for Early-Stage Software Systems Aimed at Human-Level, Roughly Human-Like AGI.’ Time permitting, some of the workshop participants may write a report of the main conclusions reached and submit it for publication.”

This summer, 11 students worked on OpenCog, with funding from Google.

OpenCog is an Artificial General Intelligence project sponsored by SIAI, led by SIAI Director of Open Source Projects David Hart, under the guidance of SIAI Director of Development Dr. Ben Goertzel.

Goertzel has posted a summary of the summer’s work.

SAN JOSE, CA, August 29, 2008 – Singularity Summit 2008: Opportunity, Risk, Leadership takes place October 25 at the intimate Montgomery Theater in San Jose, CA, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today. Now in its third year, the Singularity Summit gathers the smartest people around to explore the biggest idea of our time: the Singularity.

Keynotes will include Ray Kurzweil, updating his predictions in The Singularity is Near, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner, who will examine the Singularity’s plausibility. At the Intel Developer Forum on August 21, 2008, he explained why he thinks the gap between humans and machines will close by 2050. “Rather than look back, we’re going to look forward 40 years,” said Rattner. “It’s in that future where many people think that machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence.”

“The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century,” said computer scientist Dr. Vernor Vinge in a seminal paper in 1993. “We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.”

Singularity Summit 2008 will feature an impressive lineup:

• Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy, pioneering AI and robotics researcher
• Dr. Eric Baum, AI researcher, author of What is Thought?
• Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com, author of Robotic Nation
• Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, robotics professor at MIT, creator of Kismet
• Dr. Peter Diamandis, chair and CEO of X PRIZE Foundation
• Esther Dyson, entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist
• Dr. Pete Estep, chair and CSO of Innerspace Foundation
• Dr. Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, author of Fab
• Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of Novamente, director of research at SIAI
• John Horgan, science journalist, author of The Undiscovered Mind
• Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, author of The Singularity is Near
• Dr. James Miller, author of forthcoming book on Singularity economics
• Dr. Marvin Minsky, one of AI’s founding fathers, author of The Emotion Machine
• Dr. Dharmendra Modha, cognitive computing lead at IBM Almaden Research Center
• Bob Pisani, news correspondent for financial news network CNBC
• Justin Rattner, VP and CTO of Intel
• Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, creator of Twine semantic-web application
• Peter Thiel, president of Clarium, managing partner of Founders Fund
• Dr. Vernor Vinge, author of original paper on the technological Singularity
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow at SIAI, author of Creating Friendly AI
• Glenn Zorpette, executive editor of IEEE Spectrum

Registration details are available at http://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/.

About the Singularity Summit

Each year, the Singularity Summit attracts a unique audience to the Bay Area, with visionaries from business, science, technology, philanthropy, the arts, and more. Participants learn where humanity is headed, meet the people leading the way, and leave inspired to create a better world. “The Singularity Summit is the premier conference on the Singularity,” Kurzweil said. “As we get closer to the Singularity, each year’s conference is better than the last.”

The Summit was founded in 2006 by long-term philanthropy executive Tyler Emerson, inventor Ray Kurzweil, and investor Peter Thiel. Its purpose is to bring together and build a visionary community to further dialogue and action on complex, long-term issues that may transform the world. Its host organization is the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization studying the benefits and risks of advanced artificial intelligence systems.

Singularity Summit 2008 partners include Clarium Capital, Cartmell Holdings, Twine, Powerset, United Therapeutics, KurzweilAI.net, IEEE Spectrum, DFJ, X PRIZE Foundation, Long Now Foundation, Foresight Nanotech Institute, Novamente, SciVestor, Robotics Trends, and MINE.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel will speak on the OpenCog Project on September 7th in Menlo Park, CA.

He will speak on OpenCog Prime, to be implemented in the OpenCog open-source AI software framework, sponsored by SIAI.

Link

The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence will be held March 6-9, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia. The conference website AGI-09.org will give full details on the conference in its scientific and practical aspects. Registration opens October 1, 2008.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel is the Conference Chairman, and SIAI Director of Outreach Bruce Klein is on the Organizing Committee.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel will speak at the World Future Society conference, to be held July 26 to 28 in Washington DC.

Video from the “First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence” is available online.

Chaired by SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel and Director of Outreach Bruce Klein, with software support from Director of Open-Source Projects David Hart, and with Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky in attendance, the conference was an important step to building a strong scientific community around AGI. The proceedings have been published by IOS Press.

Reports on the conference appeared in New Scientist and the local press. See also the report on the SIAI blog.