The current list of speakers for this session, subject to change, is:
Ben Goertzel: Introduction to AI, intelligence enhancement, and mind uploading
Ben Goertzel is founder and CEO of two computer science firms Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC, and of the non-profit AGIRI (Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute). He has served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. He is author of two books focused on the future of technology and society Creating Internet Intelligence (Plenum, 2001) and The Path to Posthumanity (Academica, 2006). He serves as Director of Research for the Singularity Institute for AI.
Paul Rosenbloom: From Cognitive Architectures to Virtual Humans
Paul Rosenbloom is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Project Leader at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and Deputy Director of USC’s Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies. He spent twenty years at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, including ten years leading new directions activities across computer science and related fields, ending up with a stint as ISI’s Deputy Director. Prior to coming to USC in 1987, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Stanford University, and a Research Computer Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (where he received his Ph.D. in 1983). He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and has served as a councilor of the AAAI and as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence.
Research-wise, he is happiest when able to develop and apply parsimonious unified models of complex bodies of diverse phenomena. Much of this has focused on the creation of cognitive architectures that model the human mind while supporting the construction of intelligent agents and virtual humans. For fifteen years he was a co-PI of the Soar Project, a multi-disciplinary, multi-site attempt at developing, understanding, and applying such an architecture; and is now working on a new approach to cognitive architectures, and their extension for embodiment in virtual humans, based on the combination of uniformity and broad functionality enabled by graphical models. However, he is also writing a book about the nature and structure of computing as a great scientific domain, grounded in reflections on the diversity of his new directions activities at ISI.
Randal Koene: Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (tentative)
Randal A. Koene is a neuroscientist and neuroengineer, and co-founder of carboncopies.org, the outreach and roadmapping organization for Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM). He is currently directing the Analysis team at the nanotechnology company Halcyon Molecular in Silicon Valley. Between 2008 and 2010, Koene was Director of the Department of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia, the third largest private research organization in Europe.
Dr. Koene earned his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at McGill University, and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Information Theory at Delft University of Technology. He is a former Professor at the Center for Memory and Brain of Boston University, and is co-founder of the Neural Engineering Corporation of Massachusetts. Randal Koene established the MindUploading.org website and first proposed the term and specific approach called whole brain emulation, the purpose of which is the technological accomplishment of mind transfer to a different substrate.
Dr. Koene’s professional research objective is the implementation of whole brain emulation: creating the large-scale high-resolution representations and emulations of activity in neuronal circuitry that are needed in patient-specific neuroprostheses. He is a member of the Oxford working group that convened in 2007 to create a first roadmap toward whole brain emulation. Dr. Koene investigates the fundamental requirements for substrate-independent minds, the nano- and synthetic bio-technological tools for data acquisition and interfacing with the biological brain at large scale and high resolution, as well as novel computational substrates that can support emulated functions of the mind.
Suzanne Gildert: Pavlov’s AI: What do superintelligences REALLY want?
Suzanne Gildert is currently working as an experimental Physicist at D-Wave Systems, Inc, a Vancouver based start-up company who are designing and building Quantum Computing Hardware, and investigating the applications of such hardware to machine learning and AI applications.
Suzanne received her PhD in Experimental Device Physics in 2008 and previously an MSci degree in Physics with Electronics, also from the University of Birmingham. Through her research she has gained expertise in the areas of microscopy, lithography and device fabrication techniques, superconducting digital electronics, high vacuum and low-temperature apparatus, and communication of science to the public. She has participated in numerous collaborative projects including a large European initiative on road-mapping potential applications of superconducting digital electronics. Suzanne has a wide range of interests and believes that important advancements are made where many diverse disciplines intersect.
Suzanne is also active in the H+ movement, and she has given several presentations to this community. She is co-founder of the outreach and networking organization ‘carboncopies’, which is dedicated to understanding how to build minds which are independent of their substrate, such as non-biological (machine) intelligences. She has also spoken about Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Physics to a range of audiences, both at technical research conferences and more general events. She regularly participates in outreach activities aimed at interesting schoolchildren in science. She maintains a popular blog entitled ‘Physics and Cake’ which discusses many of her topics of interest, such as quantum computing, neuroscience, and intelligent machines. Suzanne is currently also working on initiating big picture projects in the area of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Suzanne also has an interest in fantasy and gothic artwork, and she has published a book of collected works and associated merchandise.
Adrian Stoica: Speculations on robots, cyborgs and telepresence
Adrian is a Senior Research Scientist and Supervisor of the Advanced Robotic Controls Group at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. In the last 20 years of involvement in research and development Adrian pioneered concepts and demonstrated technologies in Robotics, Secure and Survivable Systems, and Advanced Quality of Life. He has a continuous interest in these areas, in particular in the avant-garde topics, such as Cyborgs, Novel Biometrics, Regenerative Medicine, etc.
Alex Peake: Autocatalyzing Intelligence Symbiosis: what happens when artificial intelligence for intelligence amplification drives a 3dfx-like intelligence explosion
Alex Peake is the founder and CEO of Primer Labs, a startup that creates endless learning games to make all knowledge playable. Alex founded the alternative fashion company Tactical Corsets in 2009. Alex was the editor of Agile Journal, a web & mobile applications developer at Sling, and lead animation editor at Atomic Cartoons.
Geordie Rose: Finding the essence of an object using a quantum annealing machine
Geordie Rose is a founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and physics-based processor design, and has been invited to speak on these topics in venues ranging from the 2003 TED Conference to Supercomputing 2008.
His ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology has received coverage in MIT Technology Review magazine, The Economist, New Scientist, Scientific American and Science magazines, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. He has received several awards and accolades for his work with D Wave, including being short-listed for a 2005 World Technology Award.
Dr. Rose holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a BEng in Engineering Physics, specializing in semiconductor engineering.
Moran Cerf: Advanced brain-machine interfaces – Experimental Data and Possibilities
Dr. Cerf is a former Caltech graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems, and a post-doctoral scholar at the department of neurosurgery at UCLA, working with Profs. Christof Koch and Itzhak Fried. His research focuses on understanding the ways by which conscious percepts are encoded in our brain. Using micro-electrodes implanted in patients brains during brain surgery Dr. Cerf records the activity of single neurons in humans, and uses the decoded activity to activate external devices.
Prior to his academic career Dr. Cerf spent numerous years as a hacker, breaking into banks and financial institutes. He is currently involved in the Los Angeles story-telling and film-making community, and is the current Moth story-telling competition GranSlam champion. His film “Imagine” has won the recent Reason project short-film competition.