RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. As part of this initiative, a series of competitions and events are held throughout the year. The main showcase event is an international affair with teams travelling from far and wide to put their machines through their paces. This year, RoboCup is being held in three arenas in the Genneper Parken, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The organisers are expecting over 2,000 participants, from 45 different countries, with around 300 teams signed up to take part in the various competitions.

Rosa recently took steps to scale up the research on general AI by founding the AI Roadmap Institute and launching the General AI Challenge. In some rounds, participants will be tasked with designing algorithms and programming AI agents. The Challenge kicked off on 15 February with a six-month "warm-up" round dedicated to building gradually learning AI agents. The tasks were specifically designed to test gradual learning potential, so they can serve as guidance for the developers.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. We owe the success of numerous state-of-the-art artificial intelligence applications to artificial neural networks. First designed decades ago, they rocketed the AI field to success quite recently, when researchers were able to run them on much more powerful hardware and feed them with huge amounts of data. Since then, the field of deep learning has been flourishing.