AGI-14@Quebec City
December 15, 2013
Continuing the mission of the past AGI conferences, AGI-14 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 (AGI).
AGI-14@Quebec City will be held from August 1 – 4 of 2014, immediately after the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-14), and after the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014). AGI-14 will feature talks and posters, keynote speeches, and demonstrations. Beside the main conference, there will be tutorials and workshops.
AGI conferences are organized by the Artificial General Intelligence Society, in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The proceedings of AGI-14 will be published as a book in Springer’s Lecture Notes in AI series, and all the accepted papers will be available online.
“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 by treating intelligence as a whole. 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 research differs from the ordinary AI research by stressing on the versatility and wholeness of intelligence, and by carrying out the engineering practice according to an outline of a system comparable to the human mind in a certain sense.
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.
Workshop on AGI & Cog Sci
AGI-2014 Workshop on AGI and Cognitive Science
For the first time, in 2014, an AGI conference will include a workshop specifically focused on AGI in its relation to other aspects of Cognitive Science.
Contributions should be submitted in the form of extended abstracts (ca. 4-8 pages in LNCS format). Submission deadline for extended abstracts is June 1,2014. Instructions regarding abstract submission will be posted here by Jan. 15.
Accepted contributions will be presented as talks of about 20 minutes length, and concluded with a public discussion. A workshop proceedings will be posted online.
Background & Vision
Artificial General Intelligence is not simply AI reloaded, but may be best understood as a sub-discipline of Cognitive Science. AGI treats cognition and the mind as computational phenomena, and either strives to replicate (and exceed) human cognitive performance, or treat human and animal minds as specific cases of a more general class of intelligent system to be explored.
In the early years of the AI field, the leading approaches were mostly characterized by an understanding of cognition as the manipulation of rather abstract representations: the integration of real-world perception and action, autonomous learning, motivation and emotion were usually outside the scope of the models. AI has since seen several broad movements, including connectionism, statistical/probabilistic learning and modeling, and robotic systems.
Today, most work in AI focuses on applications or abstract methods rather than building mind-like systems. In contrast, AGI remains aimed at an understanding of the mind, in the context the progress in computational neuroscience and new insights into affect, motivation, autonomy, perceptual processing, attention, sociality, language, and so on.AGI is not well aligned with the boundaries of existing disciplines, but must draw from many fields. Unlike most work in the other sub-disciplines of Cognitive Science, AGI is ultimately always concerned with the creation of complete working systems and the identification of general functional principles, which are abstracted as algorithms and architectures.
AGI has to be informed by our best understanding of the mind, and thus cannot afford ignorance of cognitive neuroscience, cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, and philosophy of mind, to name just a few of the relevant fields. On the other hand, the constructionist approach of AGI offers a methodology to formulate, integrate and test theories from various cognitive sciences as computational simulations. AGI also offers formalisms, terminology and working systems that can potentially be applied to many individual problems of the other sub-disciplines of Cognitive Science.
Example Topics
In this workshop we want to explore and discuss AGI’s integration and role within Cognitive Science. We especially invite contributions with regard to
- Making results from other cognitive sciences fruitful to AGI
- Applications of AGI in other disciplines
- Cognitive modeling
- Intelligent agents
- Integrated architectures
- Experimental methodology
- Challenges to AGI’s existing approaches
- Methodological and epistemological issues
- History of AI and Cognitive Science
- Possible areas of collaboration between AGI and other aspects of Cognitive Science
Workshop Chair: Joscha Bach
Workshop Organizing Committee: Joscha Bach, Glenn Gunzelmann