Artificial Intelligence  

According to Ben Goertzel, "100 smart guys working together toward pure & applied AGI, with savvy leadership and Google's resources at their disposal, is nothing to be sneered at....   But still, let's not overblow what they've achieved so far....." What else does he think about DeepMind?

In the past few months, the work of DeepMind has been recognized for the major advances they have made in the field of artificial intelligence. The UK-based company was even acquired by Google last year for  $400 million dollars, after only a few years of operation. DeepMind's recursive learning algorithms, which are partly based on the neuroscience research of company founder Demis Hassabis, have so far proven to be very adept at learning to play 1980's video games at superhuman levels all by themselves. This work has been well received by the press and other AI researchers, with many pointing to Google and DeepMind being on the cusp of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Ben Goertzel, another leading AI researcher offers a more muted view of Hassabis and co's work however. "So far as I can tell there's nothing big and new there," Goertzel writes on his blog. Referring to a recent talk given by Hassabis (embedded below), Goertzel states, "Demis describes Deep Mind's well-known work on reinforcement learning and video games, and then mentions their (already published) work on Neural Turing Machines...  Nothing significant seems to be mentioned beyond what has already been published and publicized previously..."

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"Nothing significant seems to be mentioned beyond what has already been published and publicized previously."

Goertzel and the main researchers behind DeepMind are very familiar with each other's work. They were both speakers at the 2010 Singularity Summit hosted by Ray Kurzweil.

"Demis, Shane Legg and many other Deep Mind researchers are known to me to be brilliant people with a true passion for AGI," continues Goertzel.  "What they're doing is fantastic!   However, currently none of their results look anywhere close to human-level AGI; and the design details that they've disclosed don't come anywhere near to being a comprehensive plan for building an AGI."

Goertzel suggests that his own AI initiative, OpenCog could yield a working AGI framework faster than DeepMind. "With an open source approach properly orchestrated and managed we could get 500-1000 people -- academics, professional developers, hobbyists -- or more actively and aggressively working together, thus far outpacing what even Google Deep Mind can do."

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 Artificial Intelligence  

Ben Goertzel and David Hanson are hard at work in Hong Kong trying to create intelligent robots.  Their latest creation, Zoidstein is a talking robot with developing capabilities.

David Hanson, Mark Tilden, Ben Goertzel, the OpenCog Hong Kong and Hanson Robotics Hong Kong teams are making progress on creating what they call "Genius Machines".

"Believe me when I show you a talking robot using OpenCog understanding on the back end, I will let you know.  If all goes well that will happen in 2015."

The robot is constructed from a prototype Hanson Robotics Zeno robot with an Albert Einstein head.

According to Goertzel, the dialogue system used in the video above is more than a database look-up, but less than an OpenCog-based intelligent dialogue system. It was created by Man Hin Leung in the OpenCog HK Poly U lab, and called ZenoDial. Goertzel says it is somewhat analogous to a system like Siri.

The system selects replies from among multiple sources in a sometimes-judicious way.  The team is using ZenoDial for prototyping human-robot interactions.

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"In the OpenCog lab in Hong Kong, we're working on a more thoroughly intelligent dialogue system (using OpenCog fully)," says Goertzel but it's not ready for demonstration yet.

"Believe me when I show you a talking robot using OpenCog understanding on the back end, I will let you know.  If all goes well that will happen in 2015," he claims.




SOURCE  Ben Goertzel

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 AI  

At the recent Beyond AI conference in the Czech Republic, researcher Ben Goertzel weighed in on the main question of the event, 'Why is AGI a holy grail of the AI field?'

At the third annual international conference Beyond AI the focus was on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, instead of asking where the AGI field stands and what methods and algorithms should be explored, the conference asked the question:

Why is AGI a holy grail of the AI field?

During his keynote talk, artificial intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel examined this question.

During the talk (video above), Goertzel discusses and shows some of the work he and his team are currently doing using the OpenCog system to control robots.  They are mainly using the Zeno bot from David Hanson, but are also generally experimenting with other robotic platforms.  Increasingly Goertzel is employing what is known as embodiment in his work to achieve AGI.

"I don't think a robot body is absolutely critical for achieving human-level AI, but I think it is very convenient," he says.  "Our own intelligence is heavily adapted to a body that we grew up in and that we evolved for, so with some approximation of a human-like body, it makes it easy to teach and develop a human-like mind."

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Goertzel is Chief Scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series.

His research work encompasses artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds and gaming and other areas. He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles. Before entering the software industry he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand.


SOURCE  Beyond AI

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 Artificial Intelligence  

Researcher and transhumanist Ben Goertzel recently sat down with Adam Ford at the AGI 13 Conference in Beijing, discussing various factors required to develop artificial general intelligence.

Leading artificial intelligence researcher and transhumanist Ben Goertzel recently sat down with Adam Ford at the AGI 13 Conference in Beijing.

The first AGI Conference held in Asia, AGI-13 gathered an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). 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 of “artificial intelligence”. The conferences encourage interdisciplinary research based on different understandings of intelligence, and exploring different approaches.

During the conversation, Goertzel discusses how probability theory is a key tool in building advanced, rational AGI systems. He suggests that the approach is very appropriate for Big Data issues.

Moving far away from so-called 'brain-in-a-box' systems, Goertzel talks about how mind-body integration is key to human-like intelligence.  Embodiment is also a direction for many other AI development programs now, including Humboldt University's MYON robot program and the iCub program.

Goertzel uses a systems theory of mind, reflecting the integration of mind, body and society to direct work on deep learning algorithms as a particular reflection of the system-theoretic principle of hierarchical pattern composition.  Deep learning is a field developed by Geoff Hinton, who is now a chief researcher for Google in the area of machine learning.  

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Continuing his longstanding work on the OpenCog system, Goertzel suggests that the architecture it uses is as an exemplification of systems based AI approach.

Goertzel explains how OpenCog is evolving to incorporate various sub-systems that balance each other to end up with a more human-like intelligence.  "The reason why an integrative system makes sense - the hierarchical nature of the world that humans operate in. Many patterns we see in the world have some kind of hierarchy, patterns scaffold on patterns, patterns in patterns." 

Along with developing his theory into the development of OpenCog, Goertzel is also working on a book, Building Better Minds.



SOURCE  Adam Ford, Image - OpenCog

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 Friendly AI  

To spur the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) David Hanson urges greater international and cross-disciplinary co-operation. His goal is to develop AGI systems that surpass human-level creative genius, yet remain friendly. He calls these creations, Genius Machines.

Robotics pioneer, David Hanson is pushing for an integrated global initiative to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).  His goal is to develop AGI systems that surpass human-level creative genius, yet remain friendly.  He calls these creations, Genius Machines.

Hanson has created the robots, Bina48, Diego-San and is the Robokind platform. Hanson's work in rubber and sculpture resulted in the amazing breakthrough of Frubber™. He integrates a vast array of disciplines including engineering, philosophy and art to further the development of “robots as socially adept as any human being.” He is as much an artist as a scientist, and his work in robotics have earned him praise as a “genius” by both PC Magazine and WIRED.

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To accomplish the goal of Genius Machines, Hanson proposes the following techniques to accelerate progress:

GENI (www.geni.ai) - GENI is an organization created to rally the effort in creating genius machines.  The resulting AI can be called GENI, which stands for Generation of General Intelligence.  Hanson hopes botht he tools and the community of GENI will serve as a breeding ground for new AGI.

GLUE (www.glue.ai) - To make the GENI systems, GLUE proposes to be an effort to bridge the numerous components into super-systems. These "bridging" efforts seek to expand the integrative design of AI, AGI and robotics research.  Hanson hopes to bridge platforms such as ROS, Microsoft's Robotic programming system, OpenCog and more with GLUE.

Character AI - Perhaps what Hanson is most famous for is the development of character and expression driven robotics and AI.  To him, the natural, human-like interaction is a requisite scaffold for Friendly AGI.  First, such design allows for people to desire and interact with the systems, and second this market may naturally select for AGI that understand humans and care about us--leading towards increasingly Friendly AGI.

Interestingly, Hanson proposes that creativity is an emergent pattern from physical interaction, and that perhaps our own creativity is distinguished by complexity and our memory.  It follows then, that for artificial intelligence systems to be considered creative they should probably be enabled with robotics.

Hanson would like to further develop the creative capacity of AI systems through research.

Overall he also stresses the need for better software and hardware systems to make Genius Machines possible.  Part of this development will require extending intelligent robotics out of research labs and into the consumer space.

The video was recorded at the Winter Intelligence Oxford http://winterintelligence.org - Organized by the Future of Humanity Institute http://fhi.ox.ac.uk/ - AGI12 -http://agi-conference.org/2012.


SOURCE  Adam Ford

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 Artificial Intelligence  

In an interesting TED talk from a recent event in Hong Kong,  AI researcher Ben Goertzel describes his previous work towards developing AGI, and how he is now working with Hanson Robotics.

Ben Goertzel is an American author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He is currently Chief Science Officer of Hong Kong financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings, and also leads Novamente LLC, a privately held software company that attempts to develop a form of strong AI, which he calls “Artificial General Intelligence”.

Goertzel is also the CEO of Biomind LLC, a company that provides AI-based bioinformatics services. He is Vice Chair of futurist organization Humanity+ and he is an advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and formerly its Director of Research. He divides his time between residences in Hong Kong, and Rockville Maryland.

In this interesting TED talk from a recent event in Hong Kong, Goertzel describes his previous work towards developing AGI, and how he is now working with Hanson Robotics. New research is now being undertaken to combine Goertzel's OpenCog AI framework to operate a Hanson Robokind robot.

Goertzel, in moving towards the robotics approach seemingly has embraced embodiment as a path to AGI.  "We always knew we would have to move from virtual agents to physical robots if we wanted to end up with a human-like intelligence," he states.


SOURCE  TEDx Hong Kong

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