[Toss-devel] Fwd: [open-nars] ANNOUNCEMENT: AGI & Constructivist AI Sumer School, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 2012

[Lukasz S. <luk...@gm...>]

Just FYI (no strong advocacy or announcements on my part).

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pei Wang <mai...@gm...>
Date: Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 3:51 PM
Subject: [open-nars] ANNOUNCEMENT: AGI & Constructivist AI Sumer School,
Reykjavik, Iceland, August 2012
To: open-nars <ope...@go...>



*AGI & Constructivist AI Summer School*
*Reykjavik, Iceland
August 1-15 2012*


*Home Page*: http://wiki.humanobs.org/public:events:agi-summerschool-2012
*Detailed Schedule*:
http://wiki.humanobs.org/public:events:agi-summerschool-2012:schedule

*Summary*

This summer school focuses on issues related to the original goal of
artificial general intelligence, namely that of building machines capable
of operating in a range of different environments and domains, and doing a
range of unrelated tasks in a coordinated manner, with a special focus on
methodology, integration, and architecture.

Fundamental problems are presented and dissected, including:

• What kinds of methodologies will be required to achieve artificial
general intelligence (AGI)?
 • How different will they be from today's software development methods?
• What role can logic and reasoning play?
• How do we construct highly distributed architectures for these purposes?
 • Do we need new programming languages?

Starting with the limitations of present software development methodologies
based on hand-coded knowledge it lays the ground for new methodologies
involving self-organizing and self-programming systems - what we call
constructivist AI - and presents recent advances in reasoning-based and
self-expanding architectures.

Hands-on work will include experiments in the newly-developed programming
language Replicode, which has been explicitly created for AI systems
capable of self-inspection.



*Background*

Since the introduction of powered factories in the 1800's, the use of
machines for automation of routine tasks has become a staple of modernity.
By extension of this paradigm to electronic data, at the arrival of
practical computing in the mid-1900's, automating routine information
processing has seemed an obvious step in the same direction. But could that
same paradigm be used to automate non-routine tasks as well? Could
computing power be used to solve problems and tasks that required more than
a narrow knowledge of a sequence of steps – tasks that we might say require
insight, creativity, invention? This question has stirred a hot debate from
the early days of what is now typically referred to by the term “artificial
intelligence” (“artificial” because it is hand-made, “intelligence” because
it requires more than blind execution of a series of simple steps).

With the advent of ever-more powerful search engines, classification
algorithms and machine vision applications, the line between “dumb
automation” and “intelligent behavior” seems more blurry than ever. It
seems that with the current trends we should eventually see machines have
the power of a human mind. However, a growing criticism of the current
practices of the field of A.I. has centered on the issue that current
research is too narrow, instead of focusing on the core question that
started the field, namely, Can we make machines that have *general*
intelligence, in the sense that most people understand it? No matter how
the problem is addressed, one thing is clear: human-level intelligence
calls for a complex system. Are the current software development in popular
use up to this task? Arguments are accumulating that new methodologies are
needed to lead us to machines that rival the human mind. Chief among the
functions that are difficult to address with present software design
methods are transversal cognitive functions: functions of thought that seem
highly flexible and able to operate for a wide range of human skills, such
as general learning abilities, attentional control, and explanatory and
introspective abilities.


Organization

The summer school is organized around three key threads. The first, and
main one, relates to constructionist versus constructivist AI
methodologies, self-programming, introspection and logic. The second is the
theoretical foundation of AI, the difference between cognitive science and
AI, and the basic principles on which AI currently stands. The third and
last is the role of AI in society, current academic and industrial methods
used to advance it, and societal changes that may be expected from its
development in the next 20 years.

Who Should Attend?

The summer school is targeted to those with a background in artificial
intelligence and computer science, and may also be of interest to students
in philosophy, psychology and cognitive science with a background in
software developments or mathematics. It is open to all graduate students
in all countries; the teaching language is English. The upper limit of
attendees is 35, accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Application

To apply for admission, send an email with a short cover letter and a CV to
the following email address: sum...@ca.... Acceptance
decisions will be sent out via return email, at the latest March 1st 2012.
Further details will be announced on this website. Questions about the
summer school can be sent to thorisson-<at>-ru.is

Tuition and Living Cost

The tuition for the event is 250 Euros. Living cost for a 2-week stay in
Reykjavik ranges from 1300 Euro to 2600 Euro, depending on location,
quality and amenities. A limited amount of support may be provided to a
subset of applicants. To apply, please indicate this in your cover letter,
and clearly state reasons for requesting support.


Instructors

*Kristinn R. Thórisson, Ph.D.
*
Dr. Thórisson Dr.Thórisson has been researching artificial intelligence for
two decades, in academia and industry. His research centers on realtime
interactive intelligences, complex cognitive systems and mind models.
At MIT he pioneered new ideas in the area of communicative, multimodal
intelligent agents. Recent projects include developing a cognitive
architecture for the humanoid robot ASIMO by Honda Motor Corporation. He is
the co-founder of CADIA, Iceland’s first AI lab, and Radar Networks, a
Semantic Web company in San Francisco, and is the Founding Director of
the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines. He has taught advanced AI
courses at Columbia University, KTH and Reykjavik University, and consulted
for NASA and British Telecom, among others. Kris has authored numerous
scientific papers and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of
Artificial General Intelligence and the LNCS Transactions on
Computational Collective Intelligence. Dr. Thórisson is PI of the HUMANOBS
FP7 project with Eric Nivel, which is poised to break new ground in the
field of AGI in the next 12 months.

• Cognitive architecture for ASIMO
• Co-founder of Center for Analysis & Design of Intelligent
Agents, Reykjavik University
 • Founding Director, Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines
• PI of the HUMANOBS Project
 • Editorial boards:
 • LNCS Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence
• Journal of Artificial General Intelligence

*Pei Wang, Ph.D.
*
Dr. Wang is an Associate Professor at Temple University and an Affiliate
Researcher at IIIM in Reykjavik. He is the author of Rigid Flexibility: The
Logic of Intelligence (Springer 2006, Applied Logic Series). He received
his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Indiana
University, and his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science, both from Peking
University. His research interests include artificial intelligence
and cognitive science, especially on unified theories of intelligence,
formal models of rationality, reasoning under uncertainty, learning and
adaptation, knowledge representation, and real-time decision making. Dr.
Wang is the Chief Executive Editor of the Journal of Artificial General
Intelligence.

• Author of NARS (Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System)
• Editor-in-Chief: Journal of Artificial General Intelligence

*Eric Nivel, Dipl. Eng.
*
Mr. Nivel is a senior R&D engineer at Reykjavik University's Center for
Analysis & Design of Intelligent Agents (CADIA). Eric's wide range of
technical expertise includes evolutionary computing and architectures for
autonomous systems to real time distributed systems and high-performance
computing. He has developed a self-rewriting computational substrate for
general autonomous systems, some of which has been used as primary
technical frameworks for professional theatrical art works. His work
was awarded sponsorship by the French Ministry of Culture and the French
Agency for Research. Eric has extensive experience in research and project
management. He was the lead software engineer at Holografika in Hungary,
where he designed the software for a 2.5 x 2 x 1.5 meter realtime hologram
generation and transmission system, and participated in various related FP6
projects like HOLOVISION, for which he coordinated the software
engineering. He also consulted for research, telecom and aerospace concerns
like Institut Pasteur, France Telecom, and Dassault Aviation. Eric
currently leads the HUMANOBS FP7 project with Dr. Thórisson.

• Co-Director of science and engineering, HUMANOBS FP7 project
• Extensive experience in software engineering and advanced A.I. projects
 • Author of the Ikon Flux AGI architecture

*Yngvi Bjornsson, Ph.D.
*
Dr. Bjornsson is the director and co-founder of CADIA (with Kristinn R.
Thórisson). His main research focus is in developing search techniques as a
general problem-solving/inference mechanism, and applying them to a wide
variety of problem domains. At Reykjavik University he is heading a project
into building general game-playing agents; such agents can automatically
learn how to play many different games at an expert level without any human
intervention. A successful realization of this task poses interesting
research challenges for artificial intelligence sub-disciplines such
as knowledge representation, logic inference, agent-based reasoning,
heuristic search, and machine learning. Yngvi's agent, CADIA-Player, won
the third and fourth International General Game Playing Competitions (2007,
2008). Before joining Reykjavík University in 2004 he was a research
associate with the GAMES research group at University of Alberta, Canada,
working as a part of a team developing techniques or solving large-scale
search problems, such as solving the game of checkers (named by Science
Magazine as one of top ten scientific achievements of the year 2007).
Yngvi's extensive experience in building high-performance search/inference
systems will be valuable to the project in various ways, especially for the
development of the reasoning reand learning capabilities of the system.

• Author of CADIA-Player, two-time winner, GGP Competition at Stanford
• Co-founder of CADIA

 *Ricardo Sanz, Ph.D.
*
Dr. Sanz is professor in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at
the University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and
specializes in the frontier between control, computing and
intelligence–embedded systems, real-time distributed systems, software
engineering, artificial intelligence and cognitive systems. He has been
involved in, and led, numerous EU-funded research projects in the field of
real-time distributed systems and complex intelligent controllers. He is
the chairman of the International Federation of Automatic Control Technical
Committee on Computers and Control and directs theAutonomous Systems lab at
University of Madrid. He has been evaluator and reviewer for the European
Commission in the fields of real-time embedded systems, cognitive systems,
dependability and complex systems.

• Director of Autonomous Systems lab


Invited Presenters

*Hector Geffner, Ph.D.*
Dr. Geffner's research includes planning, search, and related topics and he
is the author of Default Reasoning: Causal and Conditional
Theories (MIT Press, 1992). He is a professor at the Departamento de
Tecnologia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he heads the Artificial
Intelligence Group, and a researcher at the Institucion Catalana de Recerca
i Estudis Avançats (ICREA). Dr. Geffner is a recipient of the 1990
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Dissertation Award.


*Ben Goertzel, Ph.D.*
Dr. Goertzel is the founder of AGI conference and the AGI Society. He is
the author of numerous books on AGI and related topics
including Probabilistic Logic Networks (Springer-Verlag, 2008)
and Artificial General Intelligence (Springer-Verlag, 2006). He currently
leads Novamente LLC, a privately held software company that attempts
to develop a form of strong AI. He is also the CEO of Biomind LLC, a
company that markets a software product for the AI-supported analysis of
biological microarray data; and he is an advisor to the Singularity
Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and formerly its Director of
Research.


*Selmer Bringsjord, Ph.D.*
Dr. Bringsjord specializes in the logico-mathematical and philosophical
foundations of arti cial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science, and in
collaboratively building AI systems on the basis of computational logic. He
is author of What Robots Can & Can't Be (1992, Kluwer) and Superminds:
People Harness Hypercomputation, and More (2003, Kluwer). He is the Chair
of the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute (RPI) and the Director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning (RAIR)
Lab.


Summer School Organizers

*Kristin R. Thórisson*
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University
Director, Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines
Menntavegur 1
101 Reykjavik, Iceland
thorisson at ru.is
+354 898 0398

*Pei Wang*
Temple University
USA

*Eric Nivel*
School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University
Menntavegur 1
101 Reykjavik, Iceland

*Deon Garrett*
Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines
and SCS, Reykjavik University
Menntavegur 1
2. h. Uranus
101 Reykjavik
Iceland




-------------------------

The AGI Summer School is part of the HUMANOBS project which is sponsored by
a European FP7 ICT Research Project Grant. Additional support is provided
by Reykjavik University and the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent
Machines.