The universe seems incredibly complex. But could its rules be dead simple? Juergen Schmidhuber's fascinating story will convince you that this universe and your own life are just by-products of a very simple and fast program computing all logically possible universes. Juergen Schmidhuber is Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab IDSIA (since 1995), Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano, Switzerland (since 2009), and Professor SUPSI (since 2003). He helped to transform IDSIA into one of the world's top ten AI labs (the smallest!), according to the ranking of Business Week Magazine.

The purpose of the conference was to exchange ideas about the creation of artificial systems with general intelligence at, and ultimately beyond, the human level. GI-09, the Second International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, was held March 6-9 in Arlington, Virginia. Ben Goertzel chaired the conference, and Marcus Hutter and Pascal Hitzler chaired the program committee. Continuing the mission of AGI-08 (which was held March 2008 at the University of Memphis), the purpose of the conference was to provide a venue for exchange of in-depth scientific ideas and results between researchers working directly toward the original goal of the AI endeavor: the creation of artificial systems with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. The first day of the conference featured in-depth tutorials on leading AGI systems and approaches, including introductions to the SOAR, Texai, and OpenCog software, and overviews of the logic-based, reinforcement learning and program-induction approaches to AGI.

Juergen Schmidhuber, 54, is a computer scientist who works on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Considered to be one of the pioneers in improving neural networks, his techniques, the best known being Long Short-Term Memory, have been incorporated in speech translation software in smartphones. In this interview conducted in Berlin, he speaks of developments in AI, why the fear of job loss due to AI is unfounded, and his work. I would be quite biased because I'd say what's happening in my lab is the most exciting. My goal remains the same as it has been for a very long time: to build a general-purpose AI that can learn to do multiple things.

How the Theory Explains Humor. Consider the following statement: Biological organisms are driven by the "Four Big F's": Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, Mating. Some subjective observers who read this for the first time think it is funny. As the eyes are sequentially scanning the text the brain receives a complex visual input stream. The latter is subjectively partially compressible as it relates to the observer's previous knowledge about letters and words.

General Intelligence, was held March 6-9 in Arlington, Virginia. Pascal Hitzler chaired the program committee. The first day of the conference featured in-depth tutorials on leading AGI systems and approaches, including introductions to the SOAR, Texai, and OpenCog software, and overviews of the logic-based, reinforcement learning and program-induction approaches to AGI. Following this, the main conference on Saturday and Sunday featured a number of themed sessions: Evaluation and Metrics (chaired by John Laird), Robotics and Embodiment (chaired by Itamar Arel), Cognitive Architectures (chaired by Pei Wang and Stephen Reed), Logical Approaches to AGI (chaired by Selmer Bringsjord), Learning and Reasoning (chaired by Selmer Bringsjord), Speech and Language (chaired by Moshe Looks), and Self-Awareness and Consciousness (chaired by Ben Goertzel). There were fewer industry participants because in early 2009 (due to the global economic crisis) many U.S. firms were restricting On the other hand there was an Emanuel Kitzelmann, Martin Hofmann, and Ute even greater international participation, including Schmid, from the Cognitive Systems Group at the a keynote speech by Juergen Schmidhuber (from University of Bamberg, who work in the AI tradition IDSIA, in Lugano, Switzerland, and the Technical of "inductive programing." Their paper University of Munich) and a large number of presentations described a clever way to reformulate the conclusions from German researchers.