Stephen Omohundro
Founder and President, Self-Aware Systems
Stephen M. Omohundro, Ph.D., is founder and president of Self-Aware Systems, a think tank working to build wisdom into emerging technologies. He serves on the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation. He has had a wide-ranging career as a scientist, university professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in Physics and Mathematics, and received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He published the book Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics on his dissertation work.
His first company, Om Sonic Systems, designed and built custom music synthesizers. As a scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation, he co-developed StarLisp, the programming language for the massively parallel Connection Machine. He was a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana where he co-founded the Center for Complex Systems Research, supervised 4 Masters theses and 2 Ph.D. theses, and was ranked as an excellent teacher. He wrote the three-dimensional graphics portion of Wolfram Research’s Mathematica program as one of the original seven developers. At the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, he led an international team in developing the object-oriented programming language Sather (featured in O’Reilly’s History of Programming Languages). He also developed a variety of novel neural network and machine learning algorithms and built systems which learned to read lips, control robots, and learn grammars. At the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, he worked on a variety of applications of artificial intelligence and co-authored a patent on the PicHunter image search system. While at these institutions, he served on six conference program committees and two journal editorial boards, gave many invited talks, and produced 48 scientific publications.
In September of 2007 he presented a talk at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco called "The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence." His talk argued that self-improving systems converge on a specific cognitive architecture that arose out of von Neumann's foundational work on microeconomics. In these systems there is a universal principle which governs the organization of all levels of physical and computational resources. They exhibit four natural drives: efficiency, self-preservation, resource acquisition, and creativity. Unbridled, these lead to both desirable and undesirable behaviors.
video
video
Stanford EE380 Colloquium,
Self-Improving AI: The Future of Computation
2007 Foresight Unconference,
Self-Improving AI: Designing 2030
2007 Singularity Summit,
The Nature of Self-Improving AI
transcripts
2008
Future Blogger interview by Venessa Posavec
2007 Foresight Vision Weekend,
Self-Improving AI: Designing 2030
2007 Singularity Summit,
The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence
Stanford EE380 Colloquium,
Self-Impoving AI: The Future of Computation
Stanford EE380 Colloquium,
Self-Improving AI: Social Consequences
audio
ZD Net podcast,
Building Self-Aware AI Systems hosted by Dan Farber
16:07
2007 Singularity Summit,
The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence
26:47
Stanford EE380 Colloquium,
Self-Improving AI: The Future of Computation 1:06:57
Foresight Vision Weekend,
Self-Improving AI: Designing 2030 49:58