Sam Adams

Distinguished Engineer, IBM Research Division

Sam S. Adams is an IBM Distinguished Engineer within IBM's Research Division. He joined the IBM Consulting Group in 1994 as a founding member of IBM's Object Technology Practice. In 1995 he helped create the IBM Object Foundry, which was the genesis of IBM's world-wide software reuse infrastructure. He was elected that year to the IBM Academy of Technology where he led an Academy study on Self-configuring systems, the initial IBM effort on what was to become Project eLiza and Autonomic Computing in 1999. As part of IBM's On Demand Computing effort, he is currently focusing on empowering end users to develop their own web application via a radically simplified approach to programming web services. A Native American of Cherokee and Sac-and-Fox descent, he is IBM's Executive liaison to AISES, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Prior to joining IBM, he spent eight years as co-founder and Chief Scientist for Knowledge Systems Corporation in Cary, NC, a software and services startup that played a major role in the commercial acceptance of the Smalltalk programming environment.

At the 2007 Singularity Summit hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he delivered a talk called "Superstition and Forgetfulness: Two Essentials for Artificial General Intelligence." The lecture observed that computer systems today have no conception of their own behavior, operational goals and constraints, or their relationship to other systems in their run time environment. Discovering a way to imbue computing systems with real understanding, human-style semantics, and give them similar cognitive capabilities comparable to the common sense reasoning of the human child at the very least should be the focus of engineering. Research in Developmental Neurophysiology and Developmental Psychology as well as experience in developing the Joshua Blue project at IBM Research has revealed two surprising but essential characteristics for any system that can successfully bootstrap its own understanding and sense of meaning: Superstition and Forgetfulness.

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SIAI Interview Series

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2007 Singularity Summit, Superstition and Forgetfulness

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SIAI Interview Series, Coming Back Around to Artificial Intelligence
2007 Singularity Summit, Superstition and Forgetfulness: Two Essentials for Artificial General Intelligence

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2007 Singularity Summit
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