Professor Kristinn R. Thórisson
Kristinn R. Thórisson, Ph.D. is
Founding Director of
IIIM, the second A.I. research lab in Iceland;
Founding Co-Director of
CADIA, the first A.I. lab in Iceland; and
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University.
Kristinn is also cofounder of Radar
Networks, Inc., San Francisco, and inventor
of the technology behind Twine,
with Nova
Spivack and
Jim Wissner. He is
on the editorial boards of the
Journal of General Artificial Intelligence
and
LNCS Transactions on
Computational Collective
Intelligence.
His research interests focus on:
artificial intelligence, cognition, virtual & augmented Realities,
and natural & multimodal communication. He is also interested in
simulation, emergence, and computer graphics.
How can a thinking mind be produced through interactions between a
complex arrangement of components? Natural intelligence, as observed in
humans and animals, is the result of multiple systems and subsystems,
implementing a complex pattern of information flow and controlled
interaction. Kristinn aims to understand how the architectural aspects
of
a
thinking mind can be implemented in an artificial substrate. The aim is
to produce an artificial general intelligence.
Kristinn strives to build larger, more integrated and complete systems
than
achieved to date. His approach follows two main traditions in systems
thinking. On the one hand is a rather familiar modular decomposition
from cognitive science and software development. Modularization
(object-orientation being one flavor) is the most powerful known method
to construct complex systems. Unfortunately this method has its
limitations.
As the proponents of the holistic systems
approach have
pointed out, people such as Varela, Maturana, Simon, and others, many
complex systems have the elusive property that local interactions
between their parts are not sufficient to explain, understand or predict
the operation of the whole system of which they are a
part. Software
methodologies employing traditional modular decomposition will not be
sufficient to allow us to construct such systems in the lab — so
Kristinn is
forced to look towards methodologies inspired by studies of
self-organization and meta-control to achieve the important goal of
building generally intelligent systems.
Kristinn coauthored the innovative Amazon download
Report on Representations for Multimodal Generation
Workshop.
His papers include:
From Constructionist to Constructivist A.I.,
SemCards: A New Representation
for Realizing the Semantic Web,
A YARP-based Architectural Framework for Robotic Vision
Applications,
Cognitive Map Architecture: Facilitation of Human-Robot Interaction
in
Humanoid Robots,
Holistic Intelligence: Transversal Skills and Current
Methodologies,
Achieving Artificial General Intelligence Through Peewee
Granularity, and
Self-Programming: Operationalizing Autonomy.
Learn about
more of his publications!
He earned his Ph.D. at MIT in 1996 with a focus on
artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.
His patents include:
Method and system for managing and tracking semantic objects,
Methods and systems for managing offers and requests in a network,
Method for designing an interactive system,
Semantic web portal and platform,
and
Method for dynamic reprogramming dataflow in a distributed
system.