I’ve wanted to see the Tor in person for a long time, ever since reading a fantasy book set in Glastonbury in high school. My wish has finally come true! I’m writing this post from a small apartment called Chalice Lodge on High Street, Glastonbury. To my left is an organic restaurant named Hundred Monkeys Cafe. To my right and just across the street is an organic food store. Surrounding those are a myriad of crystal shops, psychic healing practitioners, and other establishments with things like “Avalon” and “Excalibur” in their names. Today we visited many of these shops. I may get a psychic reading before we’re done here. I don’t know yet. But the most important part of the day (after eating some organic cheese scones and a tofu-based locally grown English Breakfast) was, of course, Tor. This is me with my new photograph of Tor, which will be framed and placed above my bed back home in Stockholm. I love it and I am so happy:

What follows is a set of notes I took during two of the IJCAI Goal Reasoning workshop talks, about rebel agents. Both talks were presented by the same speaker and both focused on rebel agents. These talks were quite short and the speaker had to go fast, so I feel like I missed out on a lot of the information I wanted to record. As a result some parts are obviously omitted and more than usual are written from memory today, increasing potential inaccuracies or misinterpretations. Overall the impression I got of rebel agents is that in today’s climate it is a potentially somewhat inflammatory term for a very ethical trait. It seems that, potentially, any agent in a non-trivial domain would have to be a rebel agent and have the ability to go against its instructions in order to be an ethical agent.

What follows is a set of notes I took during two of the IJCAI Goal Reasoning workshop talks, about rebel agents. Both talks were presented by the same speaker and both focused on rebel agents. These talks were quite short and the speaker had to go fast, so I feel like I missed out on a lot of the information I wanted to record. As a result some parts are obviously omitted and more than usual are written from memory today, increasing potential inaccuracies or misinterpretations. Overall the impression I got of rebel agents is that in today’s climate it is a potentially somewhat inflammatory term for a very ethical trait. It seems that, potentially, any agent in a non-trivial domain would have to be a rebel agent and have the ability to go against its instructions in order to be an ethical agent.

Below is another set of IJCAI session notes. This was the first invited talk in a day-long workshop called Architectures and Evaluation for Generality, Autonomy & Progress in AI (AEGAP). The speaker, Oren Etzioni, talked about some of the work the Allen Institute is doing to drive the creation of common sense in AI. He focused especially on a need for a concrete benchmark to measure results when it comes to implementing common sense. As before, these are mostly for myself, to sort through the notes in my head and revisit something a little more organized in the future. In addition to the talk itself these will cover the Q&A which followed.

Below is another set of IJCAI session notes. This was the first invited talk in a day-long workshop called Architectures and Evaluation for Generality, Autonomy & Progress in AI (AEGAP). The speaker, Oren Etzioni, talked about some of the work the Allen Institute is doing to drive the creation of common sense in AI. He focused especially on a need for a concrete benchmark to measure results when it comes to implementing common sense. As before, these are mostly for myself, to sort through the notes in my head and revisit something a little more organized in the future. In addition to the talk itself these will cover the Q&A which followed.