Eric Baum

Founder, Baum Research

Eric B. Baum is an AI researcher and author of the 2004 book on the study of consciousness What is Thought? He argues that meaning and semantics arise whenever a compact description or program correctly captures a large amount of data. He sees the mind as composed of computational modules that are "meaningful" in this sense, found and improved by evolution over large time spans and largely encoded in the genome. He has developed software inspired by his theories, including Hayek, an evolutionary system that can solve large blocks world problems (named for economist Friedrich Hayek due to a bidding mechanism used by the program).

In 2006 he participated in a roundtable discussion organized by the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute titled "What are the bottlenecks, and how soon to Artificial General Intelligence?" The discussion included the participation of AI researchers Stan Franklin, Hugo de Garis , Sam Adams, Pei Wang, Nick Cassimatis, Steve Grand, Ben Goertzel, and moderated by Phil Goetz. In 2008 he led a panel discussion at AGI-08, the first conference on Artificial General Intelligence, responding to talks from the Overview of AGI Research session. Speakers include Jonathan Connell, Joscha Bach, Wlodzislaw Duch, and Pei Wang. Last year he presented at the 2008 Singularity Summit. This year he is scheduled to present a talk on a "project to build programs that understand" during the Cognitive Architectures section of AGI-09: The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. He is also participating as a member of the conference committee.

Overview of AGI Research - AGI-08 Discussion Session

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AGIRI, What are the bottlenecks, and how soon to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?