We canceled our AI meetups scheduled for Aug. 31 and Sept 14. Fortunately for us, Dr. Ben Goertzel from Novament will be in the area and has graciously offered to give a presentation of their current project on Sept. 7:

Topic: OpenCog Prime: Design for an Open-Source Thinking Machine (Underlying Principles and Early Experiments)

OpenCogPrime is a highly detailed software design, aimed at powerful Artificial General intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond, intended to be implemented within the OpenCog open-source AI software framework. A partial implementation exists and work on completing it is ongoing. This talk will summarize the cognitive systems theory underlying OpenCogPrime, and outline the key principles of OpenCogPrime in five areas: knowledge representation, knowledge creation, cognitive architecture, environmental and social interaction, and the dynamical emergence of structures. Current work using OpenCogPrime to control intelligent virtual dogs in the RealXTend virtual world will be discussed.

Dr. Ben Goertzel is CEO and Chief Scientist of AI firm Novamente LLC, a company focused on creating powerfully intelligent NPC's for online games and virtual worlds. He is also CEO of bioinformatics firm Biomind LLC, and Director of Research of the nonprofit Singularity Institute for AI. Dr. Goertzel is the originator of the OpenCog open-source AGI framework, as well as the proprietary Novamente Cognition Engine AGI system. A research faculty for 8 years in several universities in the US and Australasia, he remains active in the academic AI community. He was the Program Committee Chair for AGI-08, the First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, which was held in March 2008 at the University of Memphis; and is the Conference Chair for AGI-09 which will be held in March 2009 in Washington DC. He currently serves on the Board of the World Transhumanist Association. Dr. Goertzel has authored eight technical monographs in the computing and cognitive sciences, published by leading scientific publishers, most recently Probabilistic Term Logic, to be published by Springer in mid-2008; and also edited four technical volumes. He has also published over 80 research papers in journals, conferences and edited volumes, in disciplines spanning AI, mathematics, computer science, cognitive science, philosophy of mind and bioinformatics; and has developed two AI-based trading systems for hedge funds in Connecticut and San Francisco. AI software created by his teams at Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC has been used in numerous government agencies and corporations.