Beyond AI 2013 will host the following keynote speakers:
Rachel Armstrong (University of Greenwich) – „The Embodied Mind“
Ron Chrisley (University of Sussex) – „Construction of Light“
Hamid Ekbia (Indiana University) – „AI, Its Metaphors, and Their Mutations“
Ben Goertzel (AGI Society) – „Beyond Artificiality, Generality and Intelligence“ (video-chat talk)
J. Storrs Hall (Independent scientist and author) – „Artificial Responsibility“
Jana Horakova (Masaryk University, Brno) – „The Robot: Golem of the Modern Age“
Anders Sandberg (University of Oxford) – „What do Cars Think of Trolley Problems: Ethics for Autonomous Cars“
Brian Cantwell Smith (University of Toronto) – „Creatures Made of Clay“
Jaime del Val (Reverso, Madrid) – „METAMERGENCE – Kinetic Intelligence and Physical Thinking Beyond the Artificial-Natural Binary“
Kevin Warwick (University of Reading) – „Sex, Lies and Games: Turing Style“
Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London) – „What Can We Do with Crude Matter?: The Golem Issue in AI, Art and Ethics“
Rachel Armstrong is a Co-Director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) specializing in Architecture & Synthetic Biology at The School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich, London. She is also a 2010 Senior TED Fellow, and Visiting Research Assistant at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology, Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark. Rachel is a sustainability innovator who investigates a new approach to building materials called ‘living architecture,’ which suggests it is possible for our buildings to share some of the properties of living systems. She collaboratively works across disciplines to build and develop prototypes that embody her approach. Rachel has been consistently recognized as a pioneer by: Readers Digest 2012 Extreme Thinkers, Chip Chick’s Top 9 Inspiring Women of 2012, Red Bull’s ‘Momentum’ series covering Future Venice, a Top Ten UK innovator by Director Magazine and featured in the Top Ten ‚big ideas, 10 original thinkers‘ for BBC Focus Magazine and selected as one of BMW/Wired’s Change Accelerators.
Ron Chrisley is a faculty member of the Sackler Centre for Conscious Science at the University of Sussex. At Sussex he is also the Director of COGS (the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science), a Reader in Philosophy, and leads the PAICS lab as part of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems research group in the School of Informatics. He has held various research positions in Artificial Intelligence, including a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham and a Fulbright Scholarship at the Helsinki University of Technology, as well as intern positions at NASA-Ames, Xerox PARC, the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory and ATR Laboratories in Kyoto. He was awarded his doctorate by the University of Oxford in 1997. His research focuses on artificial mentality, especially artificial intelligence, artificial emotion and artificial consciousness („machine consciousness“), non-conceptual representation and experience (e.g., animal and infant cognition), philosophy of computation and philosophy of mind.
Hamid Ekbia is Associate Professor of Information Science and Cognitive Science at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Research on Mediated Interaction. He is the author of „Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence“ (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Ben Goertzel is Chief Scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series. His research work encompasses artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds and gaming and other areas. He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles. Before entering the software industry he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand.
John Storrs Hall is an independent scientist and author. His book „Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine“ (Prometheus, 2007), was the first full-length non-fiction treatment of machine ethics. He is active in the machine ethics and AGI (artificial general intelligence) research communities, serving on the program committee for the international AGI conference series. Dr. Hall was the founding Chief Scientist of Nanorex Inc., and is a past President of the Foresight Institute.
Jana Horakova studied theatre studies at Charles University in Prague and Masaryk University in Brno (MA, PhD). She is an associate professor in aesthetics (Comenius University in Bratislava, 2011) and guarantor of the Theory of Interactive Media studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. She is interested in artistic activities in the intersection of art-science-technology with special attention to the media-performance and robotic art. She regularly publishes in Czech and foreign scientific journal, books and conference proceedings. With Jozef Kelemen she won the best paper award at EMCSR 2004 (Vienna, Austria) in the history of science section. She has organized international symposiums Media-Performance (2005, 2007, 2011). Together with Barbara Buescher (Leipzig, Germany) she is co-editor of the Czech-German book „Imaginary Spaces“ (2008). Her first monograph „Robot jako Robot“ (Robot as Robot) was published in 2010. Recently she has become interested in media archeology and software studies.
Anders Sandberg is a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford. His research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. Topics of particular interest include enhancement of cognition, cognitive biases, technology-enabled collective intelligence, neuroethics and public policy. He has worked on this within the EU project ENHANCE, where he also was responsible for public outreach and online presence. Besides scientific publications in neuroscience, ethics and future studies he has also participated in the public debate about human enhancement internationally. Anders also holds an AXA Research Fellowship. He has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modeling of human memory. He has also been the scientific producer for the major neuroscience exhibition „Se Hjärnan!“ („Behold the Brain!“), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation that toured Sweden 2005-2007. He is co-founder and writer for the think tank Eudoxa.
Brian Cantwell Smith is Director of the Coach House Institute and Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, with appointments in Philosophy, Computer Science, and the Program in Communication, Culture and Technology. His research focuses on the conceptual foundations of computation and information, and on new forms of metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. He is the author of „On the Origin of Objects“ (MIT, 1996) and two volumes of papers forthcoming (in 2013) from Harvard University Press entitled „Indiscrete Affairs“. A seven volume series entitled „The Age of Significance: An Essay on the Origins of Computation and Intentionality“ is also in preparation, to be published simultaneously online and on paper by the MIT Press. Dr. Smith received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the MIT in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. In the 1980s and 1990s he held senior research and administrative positions at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in California, was an adjunct professor in the Philosophy and Computer Science departments at Stanford University, was a founder and principal investigator of the Stanford-based Centre for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), and was a founder and first President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). In 1996 he moved to the Indiana University at Bloomington as professor of cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, and informatics, and a fellow of the Center for Social Informatics in the School of Library and Information Sciences. From 2001 to 2003 he held the Kimberly J. Jenkins University Professorship of Philosophy and New Technologies at Duke University, with appointments in Philosophy and Computer Science.
Jaime del Val is a meta-media artist, philosopher, performer, producer, environmental and postqueer activist, director of Reverso Institute www.reverso.org and of Metabody Project www.metabody.eu. He develops transdisciplinary projects in the convergence of arts technologies, critical theory and activism, that have been presented all over Europe, North and South America, which propose redefinitions of embodiment, perception and affects that challenge normative constructions of subjectivity, sexuality and control technologies of Information Society.
Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, where he carries out research in artificial intelligence, control, robotics and cyborgs. As well as publishing over 500 research papers, Kevin’s experiments into implant technology led to him being featured as the cover story on the US magazine, ‘Wired’. Kevin has been awarded higher doctorates (DSc) both by Imperial College and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and received Honorary Doctorates from Aston University, Coventry University, Bradford University, Robert Gordon University, University of Bedfordshire and Portsmouth University. He was presented with The Future of Health Technology Award in MIT, was made an Honorary Member of the Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, and has received The IEEE Senior Achievement Medal, the Mountbatten Medal and in 2011 the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine. In 2000 Kevin presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled “The Rise of the Robots”. Kevin’s present research involves the invention of an intelligent deep brain stimulator to counteract the effects of Parkinson Disease tremors.
Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of four books – Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (with Sarah Kember; MIT Press, 2012), Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 2001) – she is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Continuum, 2002). She recently translated Stanislaw Lem’s major philosophical treatise, Summa Technologiae, for the University of Minnesota Press. Together with Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Open Humanities Press, she runs the JISC-funded project Living Books about Life, consisting of a series of co-edited, electronic open access books about life which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Zylinska is one of the Editors of Culture Machine, an international open-access journal of culture and theory. She combines her philosophical writings with photographic art practice and curatorial work. In 2013 she is serving as Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 ‘Biomediations’, the Festival of New Media Art and Video in Mexico City.