by Todor Arnaudov (aka Tosh, The Twenkid)
Age: 25. M.S. Software Engineering 2008 (Second average grade in alumni), B.S. Computer Science 2007 (Best average grade in the alumni) at Plovdiv University.
Intern at RIILP Wolverhampton – Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing. A polymath, independent researcher and versatile artist, working on establishment of a private company for R&D in Artificial General Intelligence and other fields, as well as a professional film and multimedia studio.
Info from Plovdiv Univeristy: http://fmi-plovdiv.org/index.jsp?id=1060&ln=1
Intern at RIILP Wolverhampton – Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing. A polymath, independent researcher and versatile artist, working on establishment of a private company for R&D in Artificial General Intelligence and other fields, as well as a professional film and multimedia studio.
Info from Plovdiv Univeristy: http://fmi-plovdiv.org/index.jsp?id=1060&ln=1
More Info: Български
An interview in a popular-science magazine: http://research.twenkid.com
Twenkid Research: http://research.twenkid.com
Todor Arnaudov's Researches Blog: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.comTwenkid Studio
(mostly in Bulgarian yet): http://twenkid.com
An interview in a popular-science magazine: http://research.twenkid.com
Twenkid Research: http://research.twenkid.com
Todor Arnaudov's Researches Blog: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.comTwenkid Studio
(mostly in Bulgarian yet): http://twenkid.com
Universal Artificial Intelligence(Artificial General Intelligence/AGI)
Program as of April 8-th 2010
It will be taught in Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Plovdiv University, Bulgaria, starting from 9-th of April.
The course is appropriate for undergraduate students who want to work in the very advanced interdisciplinary field of the Artificial General Intelligence/Universal Artificial Intelligence, also known as Strong AI. It would be interesting also for those who just want to learn what are the current theories of intelligence and how the brains and mind work, according to current theories and speculations. The course tries to give the direction of how to design a thinking machine, eventually self-improving, and gives the directions for deeper study and research.
This course is original and it seems it's one of the first worldwide, if not the first* as systematic and interdisciplinary one, including:
- Futurology (Singularity, Transhumanism)
- Neuroscience - How Brain works
- Developmental Psychology
- Behaviorism/Reinforcement learning in living beings/humans and machines
Even Love as a form of reinforcement learning “bug”. ;) The course gives insights and theories of intelligence/Universe and meta evolution – higher level principles that cause and drive Universe evolution - which seem not to be popular yet – Boris Kazachenko's and mine.
- Futurology (Singularity, Transhumanism)
- Neuroscience - How Brain works
- Developmental Psychology
- Behaviorism/Reinforcement learning in living beings/humans and machines
Even Love as a form of reinforcement learning “bug”. ;) The course gives insights and theories of intelligence/Universe and meta evolution – higher level principles that cause and drive Universe evolution - which seem not to be popular yet – Boris Kazachenko's and mine.
I will give students also some ideas of how and why to do practical research and engineering and high-tech entrepreneurship, something I'm trying to start-up myself and have some experience as an engineer (employee) in a fabless semiconductor start-up. The course is appropriate for all undergraduate students, because the special preliminary knowledge is taught in the course. A graduate student barely have an advantage over a second year student.
Lectures will be in Bulgarian, but knowledge of English is highly recommended, especially if you wish to deepen your knowledge in the field. The exam will be a test.
Lectures will be in Bulgarian, but knowledge of English is highly recommended, especially if you wish to deepen your knowledge in the field. The exam will be a test.
Probably; eventually I will translate the course to English. Maybe teaching it abroad if I manage to reach to that point.
Universal Artificial Intelligence
- Introduction to the course. Why should one do research, especially so brave? PhD – Pro & Con. Is it possible to do a private research/science and scientific business? What is a Start-up? True stories and advices.
- What is Artificial Intelligence? Is it possible? Criticism and scepticists – Searle's Chinese room. Summary of the classical AI and why it failed. Review of the results and successes in current Weak AI (specialized/narrow AI) – why do they have limitations. Cognitive Science and cognitive architectures.
- What is Universal Artificial Intelligence (UAI, AGI, Strong AI). Technological Singularity and Singularity Institute. Transhumanism. Expected computing power of human brains. Attempts for literal simulation of brains. Universality paradox of the brains. Ethical issues, related to AGI.
- Complexity and Theory of Information. Probability Theory – statistical (empirical) probability. Chaos Theory. Systems Theory. Emergent functions and behavior. Universe as a computer – digital physics. Algorithmic Probability. Kolmogorov's Complexity and Minimum Message Length. Occam's Razor.
- Design of Mammalian and Human brains.
- What drives mammals and humans? Behaviorism – Reinforcement Learning as a Universal learning method. Supervised learning and imitation.
- Developmental Psychology (Child Psychology). Stages in cognitive development. First language acquisition.
- Machine Learning. Markov's Chains. Hidden Markov Models (HMM). Bayes Networks. Hierarchical Bayes' Networks and Hierarchical HMM. Principles of the algorithms of Viterbi and Baum-Welch (Expectation-Maximization).
- Tests for human and machine intelligence. Definition of a reinforcement learning Intelligent agent, according to Marcus Hutter. Beauty according to Jurgen Schmidhuber and Todor Arnaudov. Schmidhuber's Godel Machine.
- Theory of Mind and Universe by Todor Arnaudov – mind as a hierarchical system of interacting universal simulators of virtual universes. Universe as a computer and trends in Universe evolution.
- Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. How the neocortex in mammals and human works. Memory-Prediction Framework and Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
- Theory of Intelligence and Universe Meta-evolution by Boris Kazachenko. Cognition: hierarchically selective pattern recognition & projection. Мeta-evolution as Abstraction of a conserved core from its environment, via mediation of impacts & responses by increasingly differentiated adaptive interface hierarchy. Boris' prize for ideas.
- Summary of the principles of intelligence according to Todor Arnaudov, Marcus Hutter, Jeff Hawkins, Boris Kazachenko and others. Prediction, hierarchy, bottom-up development, scalability, complexity growth. Seed AI. Sample architecture of an AGI/UAI agent.
- Ben Goertzel's cognitive architecture Novamente.
- Other researchers and private companies in the field of AGI. Bibliography, references, links and directions. Discussion and Questions.
- Exam.
See you in class! ;)
* I know about the summer school of Ben Goertzel, Hugo De Garis and their colleagues in Xiamen 2009, but according to their program, it lacks significant parts, e.g. Jeff Hawkins is not even mentioned. http://www.goertzel.org/AGI_Summer_School_2009.htm
** I spotted one interesting interdisciplinary course, called “Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience, and Zoology 619” or “Biology of Mind” by Deric Bownds. http://www.dericbownds.net/mind.html It's taught to graduate biology students, so it's too much into Biology and lacks technical/mathematical parts.
