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Another year, another AGI conference — another phase of ongoing fascinating progress toward AGI! Due to uncertainties regarding COVID-19 related international travel restrictions, we’ve decided to do AGI-21 as a mixed virtual/F2F event, during the interval Oct. 15-18, 2021. Some keynotes will be F2F, some will be virtual; and authors with accepted contributed papers will have the option to present their papers either F2F or virtually. The F2F portion of the event will be held in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are planning a special all day event geared towards a more general audience on Oct. 16 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Tickets may be purchased here for event, “How, When and Why AGI: Understanding the Emerging AGI Revolution.” All other workshops, keynotes and panels will be held at Hilton Garden Inn Palo Alto.
The AGI conferences, since the first one way back in 2006, have been organized by the Artificial General Intelligence Society, in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The proceedings of AGI-21 will be published as a book in Springer’s Lecture Notes in AI series.
“Artificial General Intelligence”
To understand the meaning and importance of the AGI conference series, recall that the original goal of the AI field, when it was founded in the middle of the previous century, was the construction of “thinking machines” – 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. As the AI field becomes increasingly commercialized and well accepted, maintaining and emphasizing a coherent focus on the AGI goals at the heart of the field remains more critical than ever.