The Fifth Artificial General Intelligence Conference, AGI-12 at Oxford, Dec.8-11, 2012

The Fifth Artificial General Intelligence Conference, AGI-12 @ Oxford, Dec.8-11, 2012

The 5th AGI conference (http://agi-conf.org/2012) was held at Oxford University from December 8-11, 2012. This conference was also called the Winter Intelligence 2012 conference (http://www.winterintelligence.org/), a continuation from 2011, when the Future of Humanity Institute held its first Winter Intelligence conference. This year's conference was a combined effort by the society for Artificial General Intelligence (organizers of the AGI conference series) and the Future of Humanity Institute (which was responsible for the AGI Impacts conference segments). The event was very well attended on all days and generally considered a successful combination of the topics.

The Special Session on AI and Neuroscience presented 4 strong contributions, of which the latter three were focused on brain emulation:

1. Hippocampal formation mechanism will inspire frame generation for building an artificial general intelligence, Hiroshi Yamakawa, FUJITSU LABORATORIES LTD., Japan

2. What Is It Like to Be a Brain Simulation? Eray Ozkural, Bilkent University, Turkey

3. The Connectome, WBE and AGI.  Diana Deca, IMPRS-LS, Germany

4. Toward tractable AGI: Challenges for System Identification in Neural Circuitry. Randal Koene, Carboncopies.org, USA.

The whole event was recorded on video by Adam Ford.

VIDEO OF TALKS WILL BE UPLOADED SOON

Here are links to the paper and presentation by Dr. Koene, "Toward tractable AGI: Challenges for System Identification in Neural Circuitry", as well as a few photos of the event. (Below is a copy of the original call for papers for the session.)

THE ORIGINAL CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE SESSION:

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are writing to encourage you to submit a paper to the Special Session on Neuroscience & Artificial General Intelligence, at the Artificial General Intelligence 2012 conference at Oxford University Dec. 8-9 2012.

Artificial General Intelligence refers to the original goals of what has become known as Strong AI, in a well-defined and concrete formulation. Artificial General Intelligence is distinguished from approaches that we may consider more narrowly focused (e.g. language translation, object recognition). The generality requirements of AGI resemble the integrated requirements of intelligent processing in animals in humans.

For this Special Session, we are explicitly soliciting papers discussing specific ways that neuroscience ideas or results can be helpful to Artificial General Intelligence; or that AGI ideas, results or systems can be helpful to neuroscience. 

We are casting the net fairly wide here, with a goal of contributing to the building of bridges between these two different disciplines, which have rather different languages and ways of thinking in spite of their closely related goals.  Submit us your creative ideas and integrative insights, please -- this is a chance to get plausible, well-argued science-grounded conjectures heard by an enthusiastic audience, as well as an appropriate venue for validated theories and results.

Papers for the Special Session on Neuroscience & AGI should be submitted via EasyChair according to the ordinary conference deadlines and format (deadline July 15 EXTENDED deadline August 15; EasyChair will be open by June 15).

However, in EasyChair there will be the opportunity to indicate that the paper is intended for the Special Session on Neuroscience & AGI; and this opportunity should be availed so that papers intended for this Session can be separately refereed.

The AGI-12@Oxford conference website is at http://agi-conf.org/2012, and the page for the Special Session on Neuroscience and AGI is at http://agi-conf.org/2012/neuroscience/ -- please see the latter page for contact information and more details.

Yours,

Dr. Ben Goertzel, Chair, AGI-12@Oxford

Dr. Randal Koene, Chair, Special Session on Neuroscience & AGI, AGI-12@Oxford

The regular AGI@Oxford Call for Papers is here:

http://agi-conf.org/2012/call-for-papers/

Paper submissions are due August 15 (EXTENDED) July 15, two months from now.  Proposals for workshops and tutorials are also solicited.

Continuing the mission of the first four AGI conferences, AGI-12@Oxford gathers an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of artificial general intelligence.  The AGI conferences are the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.

Appropriately for this  Alan Turing centenary year, this is the first AGI conference to be held in the UK.  We urge you to come to AGI-12 and join the community of researchers seriously working toward the creation of advanced generally intelligent machines of the sort that Alan Turing foresaw.

AGI-12@Oxford will feature invited and contributed talks on all areas of AGI, poster presentations, workshops, tutorials, and technology demonstrations.  As in prior AGi conferences, there will be ample panel discussions and occasions for open collaborative discussion on key AGI issues.  Keynote speakers will be announced shortly.

AGI-12@Oxford will be followed by a related conference, AGI-Impacts, hosted by Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and focused on the broader implications of AGI.  AGI-12 attendees will get free admission to AGI-Impacts.

These are exciting times -- each year we move a little closer to the goal of creating advanced AGI, due to the efforts of all who come to conferences like AGI-12 and otherwise contribute to the field.

Thanks,

Ben Goertzel, AGI-12 Conference chair

… and the AGI-12 team:

AGI-12 Organizing Committee:

Ben Goertzel, Novamente LLC

Brandon Rohrer, Sandia National Laboratories

David Orban, dotSUB

Itamar Arel, The University of Tennessee

Joscha Bach, Humboldt University of Berlin

Marcus Hutter, Australian National University

Randal Koene, Carboncopies.org

Rod Furlan, Quaternix Research Inc. and Singularity University

Sarah Bull, Australian National University

Stephen Reed, Texai

Local Organizing Committee:

Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford

Nick Bostrom, University of Oxford

Sean O’Heigeartaigh, University of Oxford

Stuart Armstrong, University of Oxford

Toby Ord, University of Oxford

Vincent C. Müller, University of Oxford

Program Chairs:

Joscha Bach, Humboldt University of Berlin

Matthew Ikle', Adams State College

For more information about the conference, please see: http://agi-conf.org/2012/