GoodAI is heading to North America: NIPS 2015 Montreal & SF Bay Area

I’m gearing up for a trip to North America this week, and I’m happy to announce that 4 of my colleagues will join me!

Our traveling team of 5: Me with our COO, Olga Afanasjeva, and 3 GoodAI senior researchers: Dusan, Honza, and Jarda

Our first stop will be Montreal, Quebec for the week-long Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2015) December 7-12. We’re looking forward to hearing from and connecting with top people in the field of machine learning and computational neuroscience (aka our heroes), and meeting up with a few friends we last saw at the AGI-15 conference in Berlin.

There are two main purposes for this trip. We want to:

1. Better understand how other researchers tackle challenges in machine learning and computational neuroscience, since many of these ideas can be applied to our AGI research
2. Grow trust in the AI community, especially among AI developers and AI safety researchers, through informal meetings.

I met with Nick Bostrom in Oxford a few weeks ago, and our conversation strengthened my commitment for building relationships in the AI community. He also gently reminded me that AGI development is not something to be taken lightly :-)

BTW, Nick's book is one of the best on the topics of AI safety, ethics, future outcomes, and more.

Nick Bostrom’s note: “Big responsibility!”

Keeping in touch with other researchers and organizations working towards AI is extremely important for us. Doing so helps us accelerate towards developing general AI as soon as possible, and allows the AI community to see that we’re not interested in developing this technology in secret. We want to be as open as possible, finding ways to cooperate and come together, so we can increase the chance that AGI will be created in our lifetime and that it will be a safe, valuable tool for humankind.

The second leg of our trip will be in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we will open more conversations with people dedicated to AGI and AI safety. Of course, we’ll also work in some time for fun, including the RoboUniverse conference in San Diego, where I’ll appear as a panelist on December 16. There are a number of connections I see between AI and robotics, so I’m really looking forward to contributing to this discussion.

Keep an eye out for upcoming blog posts about our trip, and be sure to follow me on Twitter for regular updates: https://twitter.com/marek_rosa

Thanks for reading!

Marek Rosa
CEO, CTO & Founder of GoodAI & Keen Software House
:-)

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