ETH AI Center - Todor's 2003 interdisciplinary AGI research strategy materialised in Switzerland's Technological Institute

Compare with the strategical suggestions in this 18+ years old essay: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2020/07/interdisciplinary-research-institute.html

In the 10.2020 message they mention 29 professors, as of 7.2021: 93.
https://ai.ethz.ch/about-us/faculty.html

20.10.2020 

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2020/10/pr-new-centre-for-ai-research.html

Press release ETH Zurich is opening a new research centre for artificial intelligence.

A core team of initially 29 professorships, a new executive director and a Fellowship programme aim to promote interdisciplinary research into this key technology. (...)

Core team with around 29 professorships The new research centre is made up of core members, associate members and AI fellows. The core members already comprise 29 professors from seven departments who specialise in fundamental AI topics such as machine learning, perception and natural language understanding. These members will also supervise the new fellows of the ETH AI Center, talented young AI scientists who have been recruited from around the world and awarded a scholarship. “This will enable us to train experts who will be able to implement interdisciplinary AI projects,” says Günther. The ETH AI Center will also maintain contact with associate members from all ETH departments, other institutions and the private sector in order to implement joint research projects. (...)
"

M.V's. post on linkedin (bold: mine):

"...The density of AI activities here cannot be found anywhere else in the world..." -- Dr. Alex Ilic Executive Director, ETH AI Center

Sounds about right :)

Alex Ilic doing amazing job in creating the ETH AI center, a world leading science and research inter-disciplinary think-tank in the general AI space, with nearly 100 world-class professors at ETH from a wide range of disciplines, including statistics, mathematics, computer science, physics and many more. Exciting times!

Comment of mine from a few days ago:

Finally... Well, Stanford and MIT embarked on something like that in 2018, but, in fact, such an interdisciplinary institute, even "more interdisciplinary" in its philosophy, was proposed *18 years ago* by me in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where also the world's first interdisciplinary course in AGI was offered in 2010 and 2011 at Plovdiv University by the same author. Note that the MIT's course was from 2018 and was just a compilation of lectures by various guests, without a coherent structure, unlike the Bulgarian one. By the way, the 2003 proposal explicitly mentioned the term "Strategy" for AGI (Thinking Machine), as well as code synthesis (automatic programming) as an important milestone. The work was an essay for an investments proposals competition, called: "How would I invest one million Euro with the greatest benefit for the development of the country?": https://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2020/07/interdisciplinary-research-institute.html

An archived version of the original: https://www.oocities.org/todprog/ese/proekt.htm

 
More info: in the book "History, principles and pioneers of the Artificial General Intelligence, or How an 18-year old researcher from Plovdiv was 15 years ahead from MIT and Stanford in AGI".

Kind Regards

As you know I've been preparing, mostly in mid-2020, a big book (initially in Bulgarian) which serves as yet another invitation for partners, investors and sponsors for the creation of that projected institute-research company. The title is being evolving, the current one changed to just mentioning "by the author of the world's first interdisciplinary course in AGI" or in occasions self-promotingly "by the prodigy author of ...".

However I am still unsure how exactly should I present it; probably starting with podcasts etc. Selling it commercially in its entirety seems unlikely and it may need heavy editing and trimming, also splitting it in many volumes. It is about 1030 A4 pages at the moment, in one file... :))