The summer-school will be Research-Centered, with a strong focus on mini-projects, with multiple teams of 3-5 students including a mix of academic levels (Postdoc, PhD, undergrad). Selected seminars and lectures will also take place.

There will be free accommodation as well as air tickets for a limited number of applicants with excellent qualifications. Applicants can be at postdoctoral, graduate, and also undergraduate level.

Excursions to local attractions (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Fujeirah etc) will take place in the weekends, as well as tours of the region’s numerous spectacular sights.

To apply, please send CV as well as names and information of three Referees to nmav@alum.mit.edu
For more information on some of the existing projects of our lab: http://www.dr-nikolaos-mavridis.com

Desired qualifications

• Relevant Background in CS, EE, or Interactive Media
  A mix of:
• Coding experience/expertise (C++ / Matlab / Java)
• Engineering / real world troubleshooting skills
• Psychological Experiment Design
• Interest and experience in one or more of the following technical areas:
• Human-Robot Interaction, AI, computer vision, NLP, social networks
• Interest in cognitive science and philosophy advantageous
• Team working skills

Most importantly, desire, imagination, systematicity and persistence
in order to create the interactive robots and media of the future!

The IRML Lab

Core research areas include (but are not limited to):
Interactive and Social robotics and media, Human-Robot Interaction, Autonomous Vehicles, Cognitive Systems

The lab is equipped with multiple robots (The Ibn Sina human-size Android with full facial expressions, NAO humanoids, Pioneer and other mobile robots, manipulator arms, UAVs), state-of-the-art full-body motion capture, as well as advanced vision and other sensing systems.

Furthermore, IRML has continuous access to color 3D printing and 3D
scanning, as well as to a machine shop, and microcontroller / electronics labs, for prototyping novel interactive devices. In terms of computational resources, there is access to high-performance computation, as well as multiple workstations.

There is also close contact with numerous world-class institutions and companies in the field, across three continents.

The University

New York University Abu Dhabi is NYU’s largest global campus, consisting of a world center for advanced research and scholarship, and a highly selective liberal arts college — all fully integrated with each other and connected to NYU in New York. Together, NYU New York and NYU Abu Dhabi form the backbone of a unique Global Network University, with faculty and students from New York and Abu Dhabi spending “semesters away” at one or more of NYU’s study abroad sites on five continents.

The place

Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and one of the world’s most spectacular cities, undergoing rapid development. The island capital is characterised by its signature Corniche, which fronts the amazing turquoise waters of the Arabian Gulf. You can stroll, cycle, roller-blade or drive the Corniche for a journey to the tip where the majestic Emirates Palace – one of the world’s most opulent hotels sits on 1.3 kilometres of pristine beach. In Abu Dhabi city you’ll find all the conveniences of 21st century capital living and with some surprising additions. One can tour the awe-inspiring Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque – one of the world’s largest – and you can book into one of its many beach resorts. Fine dining abounds, as do opportunities for more affordable fare in numerous city centre outlets. Shopping is as diverse as the emirate – there’s everything from marble-clad malls with haute couture brands to a textile souk (market) tucked away behind the main Hamdan Centre and a carpet souk at the Mina (Port).

Many other interesting sites exist nearby, such as the oasis city of Al Ain, and Dubai. Dubai, easily accessible by car from Abu Dhabi (one hour), is also a vibrant and liberal multicultural city, a big commercial hub of the middle east, and one of the most enjoyable places to visit, with lots of interesting sights: the tallest building in the world (Burj Khalifa), one of the most luxurious hotels in the world (Burj Al Arab), man-made island communities in the shapes of palms visible from space, rich shopping malls with artificial skiing centers. Fine cultural and artistic events also abound.

In short, this will be a summer school to remember, not only in terms of research and learning, but also in terms of getting to know exciting cultures and interesting colleagues from all over the world!

Contact Information

Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ass. Professor, NYU AD
nmav-at-alum.mit.edu

This spring IIIM is continuing it’s tradition on having an Open Day for all of those interested in the newest achievements in the field of AI. This year we have invited one of our closest collaborators Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents (CADIA) to join the event with several exciting presentations.

Date & Time: Wednesday, May 16 at 15:30.
Venue: V102, 1st floor Venus building, Reykjavik University.

Program

15:30 – 17:15 Research at IIIM and CADIA

• Dr. Kristinn R. Thórisson welcomes Open Day visitors
• Dr. Deon GarrettSimultaneous Machine Learning of Many Diverse Tasks
• Dr. Jacky Mallett Testing Economic Theory
• Gunnar Steinn Valgardsson & Hrafn Thorri Thórisson The Day My Shadow Left Me
• Dr. Yngvi Björnsson General Game Playing: Learning to Play
• Dr. Hannes H. Vilhjálmsson Ambient Assisted Living
• Angelo Cafaro First Impressions in Human-Agents Encounters
• Elín Carstensdóttir Emergent Narrative

17:15 Refreshments Open University / 2nd floor, Mars building

The term “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) refers to general-purpose systems with integrated and holistic intellectual and cognitive abilities. For a system to be considered AGI, some form of self-programming is a necessary component, since such systems have to be capable of learning whole new skill-sets from experience, not simply improving performance on a single or a small set of pre-programmed tasks. However, few systems in existence today can be said to be far along the path towards AGI. One promising way to address the challenge of creating AGI is replacing top-down architectural design as the main development methodology with constructivist methods focusing on self-generated code and self-organizing architecture.

In this proposed special issue of the Journal of Artificial General Intelligence (JAGI), we will include articles that introduce, analyze, and compare various approaches toward AI systems addressing issues of general-purpose, autonomous, adaptive, and self-organizing operation. Both theoretical analysis and engineering experiments are welcome, and there is no restriction on the theoretical or technical foundation of the design. The submission and review process will be managed according to the general policy of JAGI, except that the submissions to the special issue follow a given schedule:

• Submission deadline: July 31, 2012
• Acceptance notification: September 30, 2012
• Camera-ready copy due: November 30, 2012
• Downloadable copy (PDF) of this CFP

The special issue will be published at JAGI in December 2012.
Detailed author information for JAGI can be found on Mindmakers’ JAGI site.

Special Issue Editors:
Kristinn R. Thórisson, Reykjavik University
Eric Nivel, Reykjavik University
Ricardo Sanz, University of Madrid
Pei Wang, Temple University

As part of its academic focus, collaboration with students has always been very highly valued at IIIM, and it is beneficial for students to learn from the top scientists, get access to advanced technologies and develop a better understanding of future possibilities. IIIM took part in Career Days for the first time this year. Students had a chance to meet with our researchers and talk about their work at IIIM.

IIIM currently offers students short and long term positions as well as summer internships. For more information on career possibilities at IIIM please follow the link to Open Student Positions at IIIM.

IIIM Schedule during Career Days

• 11:00 – 13:00 – Claudio Pedica, Research Scientist, IIIM
• 13:00 – 14:15 – Guðný R. Jónsdóttir, Research Scientist, IIIM
• 14:00 – 15:15 – Hrafn Th. Thorrisson, Research Scientist, IIIM
• 15:00 – 16:00 – Hamid Pourvatan, Research Assistant, IIIM

About Career Days

Career Days are an annual event and one of the biggest events in the university student life each year. The goal of the event is to strengthen the link between student and the professional sector by putting together a trade show of companies looking for talented young people. 35 companies took part in Career days this year. For more information please visit Framadagar 2012 official web site.

Of note is the joint talk on April 12th by Yngvi Björnsson on Alan Turing’s contributions to AI. The talk will be followed by a critique of the Turing Test by Kristinn R. Thórisson, followed by a question/answer session.

The news bulletin for the event follows in this post, including the schedule and description of talks. For slides, data and other related content, please see the Event’s Website.

ICE-TCS Turing Centenary Events: Preliminary Schedule

The year 2012 is the Alan Turing Year, a centenary celebration of the life and work of Alan Turing, who was, without doubt, one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century.

With the events listed below, ICE-TCS hopes to offer a small contribution to the celebrations for the life and work of Alan Turing. The Turing Year events at Reykjavik University are organized in collaboration with the School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University, the Icelandic Mathematical Society, CADIA and The Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines.

• 12 January 2012: Talk by Luca Aceto on Alan Turing’s work on computability and the universal computer. (Joint with the Icelandic Mathematical Society.) The talk will be held in room M101 at Reykjavik University from 16:30 until 17:30.


• 17 February 2012: Talk by Ýmir Vigfússon on Alan Turing’s code-breaking work. (Joint with the Icelandic Mathematical Society.) The talk will be held in room M101 at Reykjavik University from 17:15 till 18:15.


• 15 March 2012: Talk by Bjarni V. Halldórsson on Alan Turing’s work on mathematical biology. (Joint with the Icelandic Mathematical Society.) The talk will be held in room M101 at Reykjavik University from 16:30 until 17:30.


• 22 March 2012: Talk by Magnús M. Halldórsson entitled The million dollar question: P vs. NP, and the legacy of Turing. (Joint with the Icelandic Mathematical Society.)


• 12 April 2012: Talk by Yngvi Björnsson on Alan Turing’s contributions to AI. The talk will be followed by a critique of the Turing Test by Kristinn R. Thórisson and a question/answer session with the attendees.
• Date TBA: Screening of a Channel 4 drama documentary on Alan Turing (Icelandic premiere). Location: Reykjavik University.

Further details on these events, as well as further events that will take place during the year 2012, will be posted on the event’s website regularly.

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.

More information follows in this post.

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: summerschool-2012@cadia.ru.is. 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 Center for Analysis & Design of Intelligent Agents, Reykjavik University

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

Haris Dindo, Ph.D.

Dr. Dindo is Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering at the University of Palermo. From 2009 he is member of the scientific board in the EU-funded project “HUMANOBS: Humanoids that Learn Socio-Communicative Skills by Observation”. He has consulted for 3rdi Technology Inc. by promoting technology transfer in the field of semantic search engines, user profiling and intelligent advertising. He is member of AAAI and AI*IA. His research focus is in the field of social robotics and human-robot interaction, social learning and language acquisition. In particular, he concentrated on the problem of transferring advanced cognitive skills from human to robots in a holistic approach involving several complex abilities, such as vision, cross-modal coordination, motor control, extraction of affordances, knowledge representation, learning and symbol manipulation. Haris Dindo has published over 40 articles in international journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings, and participated in numerous national and international projects.

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

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. floor, Uranus
101 Reykjavik
Iceland

Links

• Summer School Website
• Detailed Schedule
• Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

Research on Icelandic Banking System

A student (B.Sc or M.Sc) is needed with interest in the Financial System to assist with research on Index linked and housing association loans in Iceland. The research will be to establish the exact terms of loans made, and also to determine their accounting treatment by the Banks, and will assist with building a model of the Icelandic banking system and preparing a paper describing its behaviour over time. Estimated time 1-2 months at 50%, but with flexible scheduling.

Graphical Displays

A student (M.Sc or advanced B.Sc) with good programming skills is needed to take an existing simulation of the Fractional Reserve Banking System and extend it to have an animated display of the money flows created by the debt created by the system over time. Project is envisioned as an opengl extension written in python; but java or C++ could also be used. Estimated time 2-3 months at 50% effort. There is scope for extending the project beyond the initial task to create a graphical construction tool that would allow users to easily setup banking networks and debt flows to explore specific scenarios, and providing a web based implementation in javascript.

Economic History/Simulation

A student with interest in the financial system and programming (M.Sc or Ph.D) is needed to research the gold standard system, determine the regulatory framework it used, and extend an existing simulation of the fractional reserve banking system written in python to be a full reproduction of the gold standard framework. Project would be the first simulation of the gold standard framework, and would contribute to understanding of historical financial instability in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Estimated time 3-6 months at 50%.

Create a Simple Model of Currency Flows

Using java or C++/QT, create a simulation that allows currency flows to be modelled between countries, by assuming different rates of expansion of the underlying money supply and varying numbers of exchange transactions. Graphical display of resulting network flows. Estimated time, 3 months @ 50%.

Spatio-semantic Navigation

We are looking for a student(B.Sc or M.Sc) to extend an existing software package for performing robot navigation combined with semantic reasoning to produce a demo and help prepare a paper on the system. Student must have strong C++ programming skills, particularly on Windows. This task should take approximately 2-3 months at 50% effort, but there is some flexibility in scheduling.

Collaboration Project With One of Our Industry Partners

Starting probably in February, we need one student (B.Sc or M.Sc) to perform basic experiments with supervised learning algorithms on a small, but potentially complex data set. Student should be familiar with basic machine learning algorithms, such as neural networks, decision trees, etc. This task should take approximately one month at 50% effort, and the student will need to devote at least 50% time to the project. This work could possibly extend into a second phase lasting several more months.

Learning Natural Turn-taking Behavior

Starting sometime aroundthe summer, we need a graduate student (M.Sc or Ph.D) to work on developing and testing machine learning methods in a human-computer dialog system. Requires strong C++ programming skills, and student should ideally be prepared to stay with the project for a period of at least one year.
Radio Show Host
We need one student (B.Sc or M.Sc) to work on various data gathering modules for an artificial radio show host. There are various potential sources of knowledge that the radio host could use such as musicbrainz database and Google queries but the results need to be formatted into text that can be used for spoken dialogue or monologue. This task should take 4-6 months at 50% effort, but there is some flexibility in scheduling.

Creating an Annotated Database of Spoken Sentences From Human Speakers

People give indications at the end of each sentence of whether they are giving or holding a turn, by modifying their pitch slightly. We need a student (B.Sc or M.Sc) to gather audio samples of human speakers into a database of dialogue speech samples. On top of that a program module has to be created that can fetch and play audio clips from this database given some search criteria to simulate a human speaker. This task should take 2-3 months at 50% effort.

For the past few years Kristinn R. Thorisson has been collaborating with the excellent team at Honda Research Institute USA and Communicative Machines in developing integrated cognitive architectures for humanoid robots; their developed Cognitive Map Architecture (PDF) which, for example, enables ASIMO to play board games with kids.

Underlying Technology & Approach

The work relies on Psyclone, a powerful middleware that mediates between disparate modules; vision system, speech recognition, and spatio-temporal understanding mechanisms, as well as Asimo’s body. The software supports Thórisson’s Constructionist Design Methodology, which was the underlying approach to develop the Cognitive Map Architecture (PDF) which coordinates Asimo’s interpersonal behaviors.

Find the video news clip on the website of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (Note: audio is in Icelandic).

About ASIMO

ASIMO is a humanoid robot created by Honda to help people who lack full mobility. It was first introduced in year 2000 and has been improved ever since. It can now run (at 9 kph), hop on one or both legs, and pour drinks. Find more information about ASIMO on HONDA’s official website for ASIMO.

[[Note: Post updated with additional links and information, Dec-7-2011]]

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16
we will present few short talks about
Simulation and Artificial Intelligence Research at the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines

Time: 12:00 – 13:00. Place: Reykjavik University, V102

• Robust Continuous Machine Learning by Dr. J. Deon Garrett, IIIM
• Building Artificial Economies by Dr. Jacky Mallett, IIIM
• Socially Intelligent Characters by Claudio Pedica, IIIM

We welcome you to visit us and hear our researchers present their projects and explain how collaboration with our partners contributes to better results.

IIIM is one of several participants in Global Entrepreneurship Week at Reykjavík University. Full schedule is available here.

From Global Entrepreneurship Week web site:

Global Entrepreneurship Week is the world’s largest celebration of the innovators and job creators who launch startups that bring ideas to life, drive economic growth and expand human welfare.

During one week each November, GEW inspires people everywhere through local, national and global activities designed to help them explore their potential as self-starters and innovators. These activities, from large-scale competitions and events to intimate networking gatherings, connect participants to potential collaborators, mentors and even investors—introducing them to new possibilities and exciting opportunities.

IIIM Projects at Vísindavaka

• Research Scientist J. Deon Garrett presented Augmenting Spatial Navigation Structures with Semantic Information. The goal of this project is to develop a mechanism by which a robot can annotate physical environment to give it greater intelligence, behavior and capabilities. The robot might be told, “This is the kitchen”, and then be able to reason from that information to answer spatial questions like, “How far is it to the kitchen now?”
• Research Scientist Jacky Mallett was presenting her recent work on Banking System modeling and simulation that raises questions about the accuracy of current monetary and economic theory.
• Senior Programmer Guðný R. Jónsdóttir’s project Conversation with Polite Computers was presented in the form of a poster and short sample video. The main goal of this project is to create autonomous computer characters that can interact with people in a humanlike manner.

Thank you for coming and see you at next Vísindavaka!

Links

• Official website of Vísindavaka 2011