Preface

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI – to create broad human-like and transhuman intelligence, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called narrow AI – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of human level intelligence and more broadly artificial general intelligence.

The Conference on Artificial General Intelligence is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. Its second installation, AGI-09, in Arlington, Virginia, March 6-9, 2009, attracted 67 paper submissions, which is a substantial increase from the previous year. Of these submissions, 33 (i.e., 49%) were accepted as full papers for presentation at the conference. Additional 13 papers were included as position papers. The program also included a keynote address by J¨urgen Schmidhuber on The New AI, a post-conference workshop on The Future of AI, and a number of pre-conference tutorials on various topics related to AGI.

Producing such a highly profiled program would not have been possible without the support of the community. We thank the organising committee members for their advise and their help in all matters of actually preparing and running the event. We thank the program committee members for a very smooth review process and for the high quality of the reviews – despite the fact that due
to the very high number of submissions the review load per PC member was considerably higher than originally expected. And we thank all participants for submitting and presenting interesting and stimulating work, which is the key ingredient needed for a successful conference.

We also gratefully acknowledge the support of a number of sponsors:

• Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
• The University of Memphis
• Enhanced Education (Platinum Sponsor and Keynote Address)
• KurzweilAI.net (Gold Sponsor and Kurzweil Best AGI Paper 2009)
• Joi Labs (Silver Sponsor)
• Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Tennessee (Silver Sponsor)
• Novamente LLC (Silver Sponsor)
  

March 2009

Ben Goertzel (Conference Chair)
Pascal Hitzler, Marcus Hutter (Program Committee Chairs)