AGI in Japan, 2019

Here is my report on AGI in Japan for 2019.  (See my reports for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018)

In April, Ben Goertzel visited Japan to present SingularityNET and OpenCog.

AGI-related sessions such as one on autonomy, emergence, and general AI architecture 1, 2 and another on a new eco-system woven out of humans and AI 1, 2 were held at the annual convention of the Japanese Society for AI (JSAI) in June.

The SIG-AGI@JSAI held three workshops (see the event page in Japanese).

The RGoal architecture mentioned last year has now an English article.

In cognitive robotics, the following may be of interest:

• Paper: Symbol Emergence as an Interpersonal Multimodal Categorization
• Cognitive Developmental Robotics Lab (Nagai Lab), The University of Tokyo

The Whole Brain Architecture Inititative (WBAI), of which I am an insider, had activities such as:

• Collaborating with the Animal-AI Olympics (more info. on Matthew Crosby's blog) and conferring the WBA Prize for it.
• Effort in creating the whole brain reference architecture (static cognitive architecture) for brain-inspired AGI.
• Continued collaborations with Project AGI based in Australia.

By the way, Dwango AI Lab., one of AGI research bases in Japan (of which I was an insider as well) went out of business this March due to the slump of the parent company.  As it was hosting WBAI's office, the latter had to move to an office provided by the courtesy of Garm, an AGI/robotics startup.