Anhinga anhinga

"The AGI conferences are 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." This is a small conference (I expect around 200 people, give or take), and this year it comes in two parts, AGI-12 and AGI-Impacts:

http://agi-conference.org/2012/schedule/

http://www.winterintelligence.org/#calendar

The videos from the AGI-11 are available here:

http://agi-conf.org/2011/

Numenta is founded by Jeff Hawkins, the author of "On Intelligence" (memory-prediction framework).

A research release of their "Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing" is now available for Linux and Mac OS (free, targeted at sophisticated developers for the purpose of education and experimentation, no deployment rights).

More 10th ICCNS findings: Razvan Florian (Romania) presented a poster, "Reinforcement learning for spiking neural networks with modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity". Basically, this modifies the reinforcement learning approach by Jonathan Baxter and Peter Bartlett for the situation with spikes. (One nice thing is that training for XOR works successfully in this case. I had difficulties with making the classical Baxter-Bartlett setup to work for XOR, either because of some principal problems, or because my hands grow from the wrong places.) His papers are here:

http://www.coneural.org/florian/

Meanwhile, Bostonians can see jaguar cubs at Stone Zoo in Stoneham. Here are some photos:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/gallery/052506_stonehamzoo_jaguars/

Embedding programs into neural nets.

( details )