I certainly knew some names and even listened to some of the AGI-11 participants before AGI-11 took place (e.g. to Ben Goertzel, Noah Goodman, Ed Boyden, who are all very interesting people with interesting results).

I was not sure whether to attend AGI-12, or whether I received sufficient exposure to the field during AGI-11 (especially to some remarkable things done by Moshe Looks, and to the results obtained by Juergen Schmidhuber's group [I ought to have written and posted some reviews of those, but I have not done so yet]).

But it looks like I'll attend AGI-12 as well...