Future Current

Marisol Corral-Debrinski and Bruce Ames at Aging 2008

Bruce Ames is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds. His research focuses on cancer and aging and he has authored over 500 scientific publications. He is among the few hundred most-cited scientists in all fields.

Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Perry, Gregory Fahy and Michael West at Aging 2008 in Los Angeles

Daniel Perry, Executive Director of the Alliance for Aging Research in Washington, D.C. heads the leading citizen advocacy organization in the nation, promoting a broad spectrum of research focused on improving the health and quality of life of the aging population. Mr. Perry’s diversity of health policy, government, political and journalistic experiences make him an expert in his field. He frequently is called upon as a speaker on aging research and policy before a myriad of audiences. As a journalist, he has been widely published and was the recipient of numerous awards and citations, including a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bernard Siegel is the full-time Executive Director of the nonprofit Genetics Policy Institute (GPI) based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.  In 2002, Mr. Siegel filed the landmark case seeking a guardian for the alleged clone, “Baby Eve.” The case was widely credited for exposing Clonaid, the so-called “human cloning company” as a sham. In 2003, he traded his 30-year courtroom career to found GPI, which leads the global cause in support of stem cell research. He is a recognized policy expert relating to stem cell research, regenerative medicine and cloning. He also works with grassroots activists throughout the United States, educating lawmakers and formulating effective strategies supporting research for cures.

Read the rest of this entry »

William Haseltine has an active career in both science and business. He was a professor at Harvard Medical School from 1976-1993 where he was the chair of two academic research departments. He is well known for his pioneering work on cancer and HIV/AIDS. He is the Founder of Human Genome Sciences, Inc and served as the Chairman and CEO of the Company until 2004. He is also the founder of seven other successful biotechnology companies. He serves as an advisor to CMEA, a venture capital company, and to several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

Read the rest of this entry »

A pioneer in the field of stem cell research, Michael West, Ph.D., has served on the BioTime Board of Directors since 2002 and has extensive academic and business experience in age-related degenerative diseases, telomerase molecular biology and human embryonic stem cell research and development. At the free symposium organized by the Methuselah Foundation life-extension organization, he unveiled an online open sourced database, called the Embryome, whose purpose is to help identify the hundreds of cell types that can be made from embryonic stem cells.

Read the rest of this entry »

Gregory Stock is a biophysicist, best-selling author, biotech entrepreneur, and the director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. He has written extensively on the implications for society, medicine and business of the human genome project and associated developments in molecular genetics and bioinformatics. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social and political implications of today’s revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Aubrey de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation and Tanya Jones of Alcor Life Extension

The free public event preceding the Understanding Aging conference organized by the Methuselah Foundation was entitled “Aging: the disease, the cure, the implications.” Held in Royce Hall at UCLA on the evening of June 27th, 2008, the event aimed at putting the postponement of aging more firmly on the political and social map than ever before. There, biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey offered his own underlying arguments for why aging can and should be the target of current-day regenerative medicine.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Methuselah Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit organization committed to the acceleration of progress toward a cure for age-related disease. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has formulated a wide-ranging plan for the comprehensive and eventually indefinite postponement of age-related physical and mental decline, named Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He is the organizer of an ongoing series of conferences and workshops that focus on the key biomedical research relevant to SENS, the most recent of which was entitled “Aging: the disease, the cure, the implications.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Benjamin Johnston and Martin Magnusson at the AGI-08 post-conference workshop

Inhabiting the complex and dynamic environments of modern computer games with autonomous agents capable of intelligent timely behavior is a significant research challenge. Martin Magnusson illustrates this point speaking on the topic of his paper with Patrick Doherty using their own attempts to build a practical agent architecture on a logicist foundation.

Read the rest of this entry »

The AGI-08 Post-Conference Workshop session presented by Professor Hugo de Garis of Wuhan University investigates the possibility of a bitter controversy arising out of humanity’s capability of building massively intelligent machines. It foresees humanity splitting into three major camps: the Cosmists (in favor of building artilects), the Terrans (opposed to building artilects), and the Cyborgs (who want to become artilects themselves by adding components to their own human brains).

Read the rest of this entry »

Cognitive architectures play a vital role in providing blueprints for building future intelligent systems supporting a broad range of capabilities similar to those of humans. How useful are existing architectures for creating artificial general intelligence? At AGI-08 Wlodzislaw Duch presented on a critical survey by the speaker, Richard Oentaryo and Michel Pasquier of the state of the art in cognitive architectures, providing a useful insight into the possible frameworks for general intelligence.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the AGI-08 conference on artificial general intelligence, Brian Milch presented on his paper “Artificial General Intelligence through Large-Scale, Multimodal Bayesian Learning.” An artificial system that achieves human-level performance on open-domain tasks must have a huge amount of knowledge about the world. He argues that the most feasible way to construct such a system is to let it learn from the large collections of text, images, and video that are available online. More specifically, the system should use a Bayesian probability model to construct hypotheses about both specific objects and events, and general patterns that explain the observed data.

Read the rest of this entry »