Ben Goertzel's Report on AGI-09: The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, March 6-9, Arlington Virginia, USA
In early March 2009, 100 intellectual adventurers journeyed from various corners of Europe, Asia, America and Australasia to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Arlington Virginia, to take part in the Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI-09: a conference aimed explicitly at the grand goal of the AI field, the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.While the majority of the crowd hailed from academic institutions, major firms like Google, GE, AT&T and Autodesk were also represented, along with a substantial contingent of entrepreneurs involved with AI startups, and independent researchers. The conference benefited from sponsorship by several organizations, including KurzweilAI.net, Japanese entrepreneur and investor Joi Ito’s Joi Labs, Itamar Arel’s Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Tennessee, the University of Memphis, Novamente LLC, Rick Schwall, and the Enhanced Education Foundation.
Since I was the chair of the conference and played a large role in its organization – along with a number of extremely competent and passionate colleagues – my opinion must be considered rather subjective ... but, be that as it may, my strong feeling is that the conference was an unqualified success! Admittedly, none of the research papers were written and presented by an AI program, which is evidence that the field still has a long way to go to meet its goals. Still, a great number of fascinating ideas and mathematical and experimental results were reported, building confidence in the research community that real progress toward advanced AGI is occurring.
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