DOWNLOAD
IIIM Newsletter (PDF)
Vol II Issue I

Take a look at our latest newsletter and read about Bala Kamallakharan’s views on IIIM and the startup environment in Iceland. You can also get a glimpse at a future filled with robotics through reading Frank Tobe’s article on robotics startups.

Interested in IIIM’s history and want to know about it’s early days? Then Kristinn R. Thórisson’s article is a must-read! You can also gain insight into the proceedings of the AGI Summer School that was held at Reykjavik University last summer, where many fundamental AI challenges were addressed and discussed.

Happy reading!

Icelandic company GreenQloud has been chosen as finalist in this years CODE_n13 Contest at CeBIT 2013, Hanover, Germany. GreenQloud, whose CEO Bala Kamallakharan happens to be a reserve board member at IIIM, is one of 50 young companies who came from all corners of the world to present their ideas. It were no less than 250 companies which entered the contest (representing 35 countries in total!), and from those only the fifty most outstanding companies were chosen.

Tryggvi Lárusson, Co-founder and CTO of GreenQloud made this statement on the occasion of the nomination:

“GreenQloud is honored to be a finalist for the CODE_n13 award that recognizes companies who are creating solutions to solve the world’s energy and environmental hazards through technology. GreenQloud utilizes clean renewable energy resources and highly efficient hardware to power the cloud; and builds products and services on open source software making the cloud easier, cheaper and as green as possible.”

About CODE_n

CODE_n stands for “Code of the New“ the DNA of innovation. The initiative is sponsored by Ernst & Young and Deutsche Messe.

CODE_n is an international initiative for digital pioneers, innovators and ground-breaking startups. Initiated in 2011 by GFT Technologies, the goal of this network is to support outstanding business talents and their exceptional business ideas, provide them with a platform for dialog, and therefore stimulate innovation in the field.

In 2013, CODE_n granted its award for the second time under the motto “Smart Solutions for Global Challenges” with a focus on IT-based concepts for sustainable energy supply and usage. Further information can be found on code-n.org

About CeBIT:

CeBIT is the world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments. The key target groups are users from industry, the wholesale/retail sector, skilled trades, banks, the services sector, government agencies, science and all users passionate about technology. Further information about CeBIT can be found on its official website.

On Attention Mechanisms for AGI Architectures

The paper, titled “On Attention Mechanisms for AGI Architectures: A Design Proposal” (download from Mindmakers.org), presents arguments for super-intelligent artificial agents needing what we generally think of “attention”, and presents a blueprint for how to achieve the design and implementation of such attention mechanisms.

What significance does this award have for your future research?
Helgi: This is an invaluable validation of our work up to this point and strong motivation to further pursue research on control mechanisms and resource allocation for AGI’s. Our chances of getting our voices heard in the scientific community, finding funding for future research as well as new collaborators are also positively impacted by the award.

Kristinn: More than any sub-topic of AI I have worked on in the past 20 years, with the possible exception of my Ph.D. work in the early ’90s, this work has seemed completely isolated from anything and everything that everyone else is working on within the field. This could signal that either we are simply nuts – working on something of no importance and no significance – or, that we have identified an important research topic that everyone else has missed. This award puts this work squarely in the second camp. On top of that it is always nice for one’s work to be recognized by one’s peers.

What are the next steps now that you have designed an attention mechanism?
Kristinn: Over the past four years we have developed a unique computational foundation for AGI that I hope will not only get a one-off recognition at a single conference but have a transforming effect of the field as a whole. Our AERA cognitive architecture is the first working implementation of an auto-catalytic, constructivist system resulting from constructivist methodology, which is a radical departure from the methodologies everyone else is using. Getting the methodology right is a necessary – but of course not sufficient – prerequisite for achieving some results in any field, and AI is no exception. We anticipate a paradigm shift over the next 10 to 20 years, away from constructionist AI to constructivist AI, which will eventually lead to the achievement of artificial general intelligence, and show that strong AI is not only a theoretical possibility but a practically achievable one as well.

Helgi: My short term focus will be on completing evaluation of the mechanism and completing my dissertation. Beyond that, experiments on more tasks and domains will undoubtedly lead to improvements and new insights.

Do you have any comments on the importance of this article within the field of AGI?
Helgi: Establishing attention as a critical function of AGI systems is important, as any practical applications in the real world will require this capability. It has been all to common to see entire architectures being designed and implemented without much regard for the constraints imposed by the complexity of real world environments and realtime processing. Considering that the our brains require the enormous information reduction carried out by human attention – and that modern computer hardware is probably at least a decade a way from matching our best estimates of the computational power of the brain – the necessity of attention for AGI is not hard to argue for. As discussed in our paper, attention is a notoriously difficult capability to retrofit existing architectures with due to its pervasive nature and the fine temporal granularity required. Hopefully our work will have some influence on the design of current and future AGI architectures in such a way that these issues are given proper consideration from initial stages.

Kristinn: At CADIA we are slowly but surely filling in some of the major gaps that the field of AI has left wide open for the past 50 decades, and attention is a good example of that. In our approach AGI systems must be built on the assumptions that such systems “create their own knowledge”, that is, that their understanding of the world is actively constructed through their own interaction with the world. As Pei Wang (collaborator and Affiliate Researcher at IIIM) has argued for over a decade, AGI systems working in an environment of sufficient complexity will always be mentally underpowered – like humans, they will always have insufficient knowledge and resources with respect to their goals in the world. To take an example, you can never be certain – absolutely 100% certain – that you will not be killed in an accident tomorrow while going about your daily errands. Yet most people would give quite a lot to have that certainty. When you take the assumption of insufficient resources and knowledge into account you soon come to realize why animals have what we call “attention” – the ability to sensibly steer the use of their mental resources to things and areas of importance.

What would be a typical real-world application for your ideas; how will this potentially result in more capable AGI systems?
Helgi: This work can only be practically realized as part of an AGI system. This has already happened with the AERA architecture developed in the HUMANOBS project. The question then boils down to typical real-world applications for AGI systems. The Wozniak test describes a task for an embodied robot, where the robot should be able to enter any randomly chosen household and make a cup of coffee. While the task sounds simple, at the present stage of AI research such a robot would be practically impossible to build due to the rich variations that exist between households and the fact that the goal is stated at a high level of abstraction. Any system capable of solving such problems set in real-world environments requires attention functionality as the total information available from the environment is vastly beyond what could be processed at depth in real-time. So attention does not only result in more capable AGI systems, it is a requirement for AGI systems that are capable at all of solving problems of real-world complexity. If the coffee making task does not sound like a big deal, consider that the capability to solve this task will also imply that the capability to solve a wide range of considerably more important tasks will be well within reach, from such as building autonomous robots capable of saving trapped humans from any burning building to robots that can autonomously explore outer space.

On Attention Mechanisms for AGI Architectures

The paper, titled “On Attention Mechanisms for AGI Architectures: A Design Proposal” (download from Mindmakers.org), presents arguments for super-intelligent artificial agents needing what we generally think of “attention”, and presents a blueprint for how to achieve the design and implementation of such attention mechanisms. As described by the AGI@Oxford organizers, the paper “points out the inherent connection between the designs of attention management systems and the basic underlying AGI architectures, and provides important design characteristics for any AGI architecture.” The full paper’s abstract is as follows:

Many existing AGI architectures are based on the assumption of infinite computational resources, as researchers ignore the fact that real-world tasks have time limits, and managing these is a key part of the role of intelligence. In the domain of intelligent systems the management of system resources is typically called “attention”. Attention mechanisms are necessary because all moderately complex environments are likely to be the source of vastly more information than could be processed in realtime by an intelligence’s available cognitive resources. Even if sufficient resources were available, attention could help make better use of them. We argue that attentional mechanisms are not only nice to have, for AGI architectures they are an absolute necessity. We examine ideas and concepts from cognitive psychology for creating intelligent resource management mechanisms and how these can be applied to engineered systems. We present a design for a general attention mechanism intended for implementation in AGI architectures.

About AGI 2012, Oxford University, UK (from the conference website)

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 original goal of the AI field was the construction of “thinking machines” – that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called “narrow AI” – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of “human level intelligence” and more broadly artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is 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.

The AGI conference series has played, and continues to play, a significant role in this resurgence of research on artificial intelligence in the deeper, original sense of the term. Appropriately for this Alan Turing centenary year, this is the first AGI conference to be held in the UK.

Recently, h+ Magazine published an article by Ben Goertzel titled “Land of Fire, Ice and Thinking Machines: The Recent Rise of AI in Iceland, and an Interview with the Thorisson Brothers who Helped Make it Happen”. In the article the author reviews the recent history of AI in Iceland and presents an interview with Kristinn R. Thórisson and Hrafn Thorri Thórisson. In this interview they go into some detail on their own backgrounds and ideas, as well as the rise of Icelandic AI. This article makes an interesting read for both those who are curious about AI and the connoisseurs of the field.

h+ Magazine “covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing — and will change — human beings in fundamental ways. The Magazine follows developments in areas like NBIC (nano-bio-info-cog), longevity, performance enhancement and self-modification, Virtual Reality, “the Singularity,” and other areas that both promise and threaten to radically alter our lives and our view of the world and ourselves. More than that, h+ aims to reflect this newest edge culture by featuring creative expressions of humanity on a razor’s edge where daily life and science fiction seem to be merging. h+ is published by Humanity+, the world’s leading nonprofit for the ethical use of technology to extend human capabilities”.

A conference session on General Intelligence in Embodied Agents, as part of an IEEE Symposium on Human-Level AI will be held April 15-19, 2013 in Singapore.

Call for Papers: PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE: November 23, no extensions given.

This Special Session on General Intelligence in Embodied Agents is part of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Human-like Intelligence, which in turn is part of the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence.

GENERAL INTELLIGENCE IN EMBODIED AGENTS

One critical aspect of human-like intelligence is the capability to control bodies in the pursuit of a variety of human-like goals in environments, especially environments resembling the everyday human world. The achievement of this capability may be pursued via robotics, or via embodying synthetic intelligent software in virtual agents in virtual worlds such as 3D videogame-like worlds. Controlling embodied agents carrying out a variety of complex goals in complex environments is a difficult problem, requiring robust generalization and transfer learning ability, and practical creativity. Confronting this problem places various sorts of stringent requirements on the underlying computational intelligence system, which different architectures may seek to fulfill in different ways.

The focus of this special session is on how architectures designed with artificial general intelligence in mind, cope with the challenges involved in achieving goals involving controlling bodies in worlds, especially worlds bearing some resemblance to the everyday human world.

This Special Session is open to contributions on any topic directly related to the interfacing between artificial general intelligence architectures and the problem of controlling bodies in worlds resembling the everyday human world. Contributions presenting empirical or mathematical results are very welcome; contributions describing new approaches at an earlier stage of development are welcome as well, if the ideas are novel and clearly presented and argued for.

More information on paper submissions can be found here

The Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (BICA) will be held from October 31st until November 3rd in Palermo, Italy.

The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind, known as the BICA Challenge, calls for joint efforts to develop biologically-inspired intelligent agents that can be accepted and trusted in various roles by the human society, and putting them on equal footing with human agents. The main objective of BICA 2012 is to take a significant step forward towards the BICA Challenge.

IIIM’s Managing Director, Dr. Kristinn R. Thórisson, will give a keynote talk on the topic of achieving AGI within his lifetime.

More information on the BICA 2012 Conference can be found here

by Kristinn R. Thórisson,
Directing Manager of IIIM and
Aperio Program Director

The educational system has never been as important as it is now. We have established a robust educational system with subdivisions along students’ age and “level”; but, while the system offers a variety of topics to study, it also has some drawbacks. One of them is the idea that, since it is impossible to teach anything and everything from A to Z in the first 10-15 years of a person’s education, a subset of targeted teaching material and topics must be chosen from a larger set. Elected officials in collaboration with the educational establishment generally do this, and the system is molded by what these elected officials and professionals in the educational field believe is most important to a child’s education at any point in time. Of course, young children cannot be expected to know what to study. However, when children reach their teens, their key interests and talents have become much clearer, and by the time they reach their twenties they have certainly formed opinions about what they should be spending their time on, including what they want to learn. It is surprising that universities, which accept students roughly twenty years old and often much older, are as pedantic in their form and execution as primary schools. Grownups are typically trusted with deciding where they work and how they live their lives–but not for choosing what they study. Study arrangements, topic choices, and pedagogy are all pre-selected and pre-defined for adult students; the only thing universities allow students to choose freely is a field of specialization. After an individual chooses his or her field, not much flexibility remains. The system expects all students within a certain field to know the same basic information within that field. In order to graduate, students must finish certain mandatory courses and complete a standard number of credits, possibly adding a few elective courses within the same field. Of course, the truth is that the fields of study considered legitimate–the very definition of a “field”–have in every case been molded over the ages and are largely the product of historical events and accidents. Fields are not designed for the future; they are designed for the past. I have the following to say about this arrangement: If a university is supposed to be an institution which creates new knowledge and brings us closer to a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the numerous phenomena that human curiosity, nature, and the universe present to us, I cannot comprehend why everyone must go through the same courses, read the same books, study the same material, and take the same tests.

The last time I checked, there is a substantial difference in people’s interests–even after they have chosen a certain field (e.g. computer science or psychology). These fields–as with most other basic fields within university departments–harbor an immense number of unanswered questions. Many of these unanswered questions may hold the solutions to challenges that society desperately needs. However, to produce desperately needed answers, one or more individuals–armed with focus, intuition, creativity, and hard work–may have to devote roughly half their lives searching for them. To maintain this focus and enthusiasm for two, three, or even four decades, people must start to speculate, learn, and study at an early age. And, above all, they must be passionate about what they are doing. Restricting students to certain classes in pre-determined fields is not the best way to provide the support necessary for achieving such deeds. The goal of this sort of arrangement within the educational system is, secretly and openly, to mass-produce inflexible targeted knowledge. As a consequence of this setup, an individual’s versatility and flexibility within each pre-determined field of expertise will never reach its full potential. And since initiative and creativity do not have obvious and secure places within the current system, it should be clear to everyone that this standardization is not suitable for everyone. The current educational system does not adequately support the free choice of research projects, creative approach to these projects, or the creation of new fields. The only conclusion can be that in order for universities to do their jobs with dignity, and support as many students as possible to obtain the best education possible, new methods must be introduced to improve the current system and increase its flexibility. This new focus needs to reinforce independent thinking, create the possibility for trying new research methodologies and approaches, and allow for a choice of research questions and mixture of fields that excite students’ enthusiasm.

Since all higher educational organizations are based on set standards, students who could excel more are in fact held back when their ideas and interests do not fit within such a system, leading these potentially valuable new ideas to never see the light of day. We must enable students who show initiative to keep working on subjects that excite their interests. They must have the opportunity to go in less conventional–even completely unconventional–directions; directions that strengthen their abilities, excite their enthusiasm, and open the doors to creativity and stimulate the creation of new ideas. Such a system would improve the versatility of the educational system, which would then lead to increased innovation within society.

Studies have shown that the sooner individuals are able to activate their own talents, the more successful they will become. It is completely clear to me that we not only could but, in fact, must add more possibilities to the current, limited structure of the educational system. I must add that I am inclined to agree with those who point out that increased flexibility is not suited to everyone, as long as those people realize that neither is the conventional educational system.

It is in the hands of individuals and dependent on their unique ideas to improve our vision for the world and humankind’s way of life, and use revolutionizing scientific and technological knowledge to do so. It is in everyone’s best interest to promote independent thinking, initiative, and active participation among students, so that they can discover and nurture their own capabilities and talents to achieve such feats.

The Aperio system is a newly launched study program at Reykjavík University. Its approach aims to increase curricula flexibility and diversity and help students who excel to define their path of study. One of its focal points is the use of a broader set of evaluation criteria for students’ potential–to look beyond grades at the talents and accomplishments that are not typically part of, and may not even fit within, the confines of traditional curricula. Contrary to the traditional method, where students are required to adjust themselves to a pre-determined study plan, the Aperio study system provides students with increased freedom, allowing them to adjust their studies to match their strengths and interests, with the aim of supporting the students in realizing their full potential. This approach not only gives students unique opportunities to build upon their strengths, but also to improve their weaknesses, which might otherwise slow down or hinder a higher level of achievement, to develop a deeper understanding of their topics of study. The choice of study material, assignments, and evaluation of the progress of study, is conducted in cooperation with an experienced teacher and research scientists, both within and outside of Reykjavík University, in the chosen topic focus.