Kristinn R. Thórisson

Thórisson's research focus is general machine intelligence (also referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI), or strong AI) and he has proposed a new methodology for achieving machines with general intelligence. An early demonstration of his constructivist AI methodology was given in the FP-7 funded HUMANOBS project, where an artificial agent autonomously learned from scratch how to do spoken multimodal interviews by observing humans participate in a TV-style interview. The goal-driven self-programming system, called AERA (Autocatalytic Endogenous Reflective Architecture), started out with only a small set of seed knowledge (a few pages of "given" code) and autonomously expanded its capabilities through self-reconfiguration, writing the equivalent of thousands of lines of code on its own, to enable it to perform such a realtime TV interview. Thórisson has also worked extensively on systems integration for artificial intelligence systems in the past, contributing architectural principles for infusing dialogue and human-interaction capabilities into the Honda ASIMO robot.

Kristinn R. Thórisson has been Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Reykjavík University since 2004. He was co-founder of semantic Web startup company Radar Networks (with Nova Spivack), whose online Website Radar Networks Twine was one of the first working applications of semantic Web technologies, and served as its Chief Technology Officer 2002–03.