Review of 2019 & Plans for 2020

SUMMARY:

• Space Engineers released from Early Access 
• GoodAI published new Badger Architecture 
• Oranžérie (The Orangery) - our new office building

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People are interested in knowing what our progress was in 2019 and what our plans are for 2020. In this post you can learn about the highlights of last year and our plans for the future.

Highlights for GoodAI Research

• Badger architecture - we published a paper describing the framework and principles of our AI architecture. Badger is the culmination of our efforts over the last five years. It’s the main direction in which we will be focusing our research in the following years. Badger is an agent made from multiple agents (aka experts) that share the same policy (neural network) but each has unique internal state. They communicate and coordinate during the inner-loop (lifetime of the agent), and the result of this is adaptation and task solving. The search for a better expert-policy is performed in the outer loop, and only there the policy is modified. The advantage we see in Badger is the ability to automate the search for properties such as meta-learning, learned credit assignment, recursive self-improvement (via communication), gradual learning, transfer learning, and build up to AGI.

 

• In December our team visited NeurIPS and used this opportunity to discuss Badger with experts and to recruit new colleagues. What we took from this experience is that Badger is perceived as an original and promising direction, and people are looking forward to seeing more demonstrations and comparisons on standardized benchmarks. We also received some new research ideas. Overall, the trip was very successful:
• we organized a meetup on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) which was attended by about 100 people,
• our Senior Research Scientist Jan Feyereisl joined Matthew Crosby, from The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and Hiroshi Yamakawa, from The Whole Brain Architecture Initiative (WBA), to show the results of the Animal-AI Olympics which tested AI-agents on common animal cognition tasks.

 

• New researchers have already started to join our team. We aim to hire at least 10 new researchers in 2020 which would lead to scaling up our R&D efforts, allowing us to run more experiments on Badger architecture. If you are interested check out the open positions here.

• New advisors joined our team (Thank you!) & More will join later:

• Šimon Šicko and Lucia Šicková: Šimon and Lucia have been working with GoodAI since September. Simon is the CEO and Lucia is the CLO (Chief Learning Officer) of Pixel Federation, a successful and growing free-to-play gaming company from Bratislava, Slovakia. They are both experienced entrepreneurs, we have been friends for years and they have already given GoodAI valuable input. 

• Petr Šrámek - Petr Šrámek has joined GoodAI as a Strategic Advisor. He is a serial entrepreneur with a track record in the AI world which includes founding the AI Startup Incubator.

• GoodAI is proud to have become a supporter of Prg.AI. We are happy to be involved with this initiative which aims to develop Prague as an AI superhub and help the Czech Republic become a major AI center of excellence in Europe.
  
  GoodAI’s Director of AI Policy and Social Impacts, Marek Havrda, was invited to speak at the launch event in May. The initiative was founded by The Czech Technical University (ČVUT), Charles University, Czech Academy of Sciences, and the City of Prague, and is supported by GoodAI as well as a range of other local and international organizations.

• Patent - we have filed a patent application for the core of our technology. We strongly believe that this technology is the most likely way AGI will be created in the future.

Highlights for GoodAI Applied

• This year GoodAI Applied started two sister companies to specialize in specific industries.

• GoodAI Solutions was launched in October in order to take over specific projects from GoodAI Applied with a focus on predictive maintenance, visual inspection, and asset management in the manufacturing and energy industries.

• GoodAI Digital was also founded last year to focus on the automation of human conversations using the latest disruptive technologies such as Natural Language Processing.

• GoodAI Applied also worked on a number of interesting projects including:
• Developing the world’s first AI-powered diamond selection tool for The Diamond Pro
• Delivering a cutting-edge sound classifier solution for ŠKODA AUTO DigiLab
• Undertaking successful pilot tests with Bulovka Hospital in Prague for an image recognition solution that can predict the likelihood of patients developing pressure ulcers
• You can check out all of the past Applied case studies on our new website.

GoodAI researcher demonstrates image recognition technology for pressure ulcer prevention.

Highlights for Keen Software House

• Space Engineers was released from Early Access in February 2019

• Reviews are above 9/10 across all board - Steam reviews and games press

• The revenue doubled in a year-to-year comparison

• “Concurrent players” has grown significantly over the years.

• During the year, we released four major updates, which always include a free update and paid cosmetics (DLCs): Decorative Pack (4/2019), Style Pack (6/2019), Economy (8/2019), Decorative Pack II (10/2019)

• In November, we shared the details about where we are with the Space Engineers Xbox One port by running the live stream gameplay session.

• Space Engineers was rewarded at the platinum level of the Steam Best of 2019 Early access grads.

• Space Engineers was awarded as the best game in the Technology category at the 2019 Central and Eastern European Game Awards. 

New office: Oranžérie (The Orangery)

My long-term dream has always been to have our own office building which we can fit out the way we need it, and how we like it.

This year we were able to achieve this goal. We finally found a building in Prague that has all the attributes we needed. We chose to call it Oranžérie.

Oranžérie's office space is 1000 square meters and the garden is 2000 square meters (plus there's a large public park with a lake in front of it). The new office also includes an underground garage and a large conference room. We will also have our own gym, a fully fitted kitchen, a fireplace, and a garden hang-out spot complete with grills for summer barbeques!

Right now, a construction company is finishing the interiors, making Oranžérie cozy and comfortable, for our teams at Keen Software House and GoodAI. We believe that what surrounds you impacts what you create.

We are planning to move to Oranžérie in May 2020.

History: Oranžérie was built in 1760 and originally used as a winter greenhouse, it was later converted into a residential building, and then an office for the municipality.

This is the first time we are publicly sharing these photos!

Plans for GoodAI

These are our plans for 2020:

• Badger architecture
• Solve the training difficulties = make it easier to train, so that we can do more experiments
• Benchmark = Use standard Machine Learning benchmarks to compare with other architectures. Demonstrate that Badger performs better than other models or that it can learn and solve tasks that are not possible by non-Badger architectures (we will be mostly measuring adaptability to novel tasks, not task performance)
• Business cases = investigate where Badger can be implemented already, without waiting for better curricula

• Recruit at least 10 new researchers. If you are interested check out the open positions here

• AI Game - if things go well, we will work on an experimental game that’s built around adaptable AI characters. This technology could be later imported to Space Engineers.

• 3rd Round of General AI Challenge - launch a new round, focused on expanding Badger ideas and proofs of concept. The winners will be invited free of charge and all expenses paid to our Summer Workshop.

• AI Governance Congress in Prague - we will be playing a crucial role in the 1st AI Governance Congress which will take place in Prague from 16-18 April. 

 

• Summer Workshop - a fully expenses paid multi-disciplinary retreat, organized by us and hosted in Oranzerie. We will invite experts who can contribute to research on Badger-like architectures. From the multi-day retreat we expect: new insights, and new proofs of concept (demonstrations).
• Disciplines: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Meta-Learning, Network Science, Complexity, Social Intelligence, Biologically inspired neural networks, etc.

Plans for Keen Software House

• Keen Software House has continued a process of adaptation and development which we believe will ultimately bring great benefits for Keen Software House, as well as for our community. Rather than having a divided focus and spreading limited resources over multiple projects we are now devoting 100% of our development time to the much anticipated Xbox release of Space Engineers and to continuing the development of Space Engineers for PC.

• Continue supporting and developing Space Engineers. One major update every few months

• Release Space Engineers for Xbox One

• Perform an internal study on what game engine is best for the future of Space Engineers?

• Run an internal hackathon - new game mechanics, features, stories for Space Engineers

• Start working on something new & big - more details later!

Conclusion

See here for a review from 2018.

2019 was great, and truly game-changing for Keen Software House and GoodAI. 2020 will bring even more changes and growth.

Thanks to everyone who is keeping their fingers crossed for us!

Thank you for reading this blog!

Best,
Marek Rosa
CEO, Creative Director, Founder at Keen Software House
CEO, CTO, Founder at GoodAI

For more news:
Space Engineers: www.SpaceEngineersGame.com
Medieval Engineers: www.MedievalEngineers.com
General AI Challenge: www.General-AI-Challenge.org
AI Roadmap Institute: www.RoadmapInstitute.org
GoodAI: www.GoodAI.com
Keen Software House: www.keenswh.com
GoodAI Applied: https://www.goodai.com/goodai-applied

Personal bio:
Marek Rosa is the CEO and CTO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence R&D company, and the CEO and founder of Keen Software House, an independent game development studio best known for its best-seller Space Engineers (4 million copies sold). Both companies are based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Marek has been interested in artificial intelligence since childhood. He started his career as a programmer but later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally fund GoodAI, his new general AI research company building human-level artificial intelligence.

GoodAI started in January 2014 and has over 30 research scientists, engineers, and consultants working across its Research and Applied teams.

At this time, Marek is developing both Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers, as well as leading daily research and development on recursive self-improvement based general AI architecture - Badger.