Who's working on Strong AI and where?

[Relative0]

Who's working on "Strong AI" and where?

Time for me to move on for my PhD. I have become increasingly interested (have a theory of my own as I am sure many do) in Strong AI. There seem to be a decent number of postings (perhaps small in comparison with other areas of CS), those however are mostly discussions concerning the philosophy behind it. I am quite interested however in knowing who is doing what were - information on that seems to be quite lacking. I am looking for places (specifically people) who are seriously working on it. I know of generalities such as CMU, MIT, and Stanford - that they are spectacular in Computer Science - but are there people seriously working out a mathematical or some underlying foundation for consciousness (what I am most interested in)?

Any thoughts would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks,

Brian

 

[goingmeta]

There are mathematicians working on improving machine learning classifiers. There are also mathematicians working on general learning theories. I have not heard of any work done in mathematical foundations of consciousness though. What is consciousness by the way?

As far as the practice is concerned, I would add Google on to your list. They've collaborated with Stanford and have done cool things in the past. Geoffrey Hinton, who's a big name researcher in machine learning and neural networks, recently joined Google. There has been a trend of academics joining Google:

http://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2...ve-says-about-the-future-of-machine-learning/

 

[Relative0]

@goingmeta - thanks. The question "What is Consciousness" is a great one indeed, lots of thoughts on that one. That article is a great start. If anything else comes to mind, please drop a link or name.

Brian

 

[DrZoidberg]

There is a company called numenta, founded by Jeff Hawkins, that tries to understand and reproduce the way the brain works in software.
Jeff Hawkins is very interested in strong AI, he also wrote a book called "on intelligence"


Before you can ask what consciousness is you first need to define what the word "consciousness" means. As long as everyone has their own definition a sensible discussion of the subject is impossible.

 

[Relative0]

Thanks DrZoidberg,

Yes, the consciousness ambiguity is a difficult problem, do you know if there have been any strong candidates for at least partially defining the term?

Brian