Russian Federation

Artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of human life. At the
same time, modern widely used approaches, which work successfully due to the availability of enormous computing power, based on ideas about the work of the brain, suggested more than half a century ago. The proposed model describes the general principles of information processing by the human brain, taking into account the latest achievements. The neuroscientific grounding of this model and
its applicability in the creation of AGI or Strong AI are discussed in the article.
In this model, the cortical minicolumn is the primary computing processor that works with the semantic description of information. The minicolumn transforms incoming information into its interpretation to a specific context. In this way, a parallel verification of hypotheses of information interpretations is provided when comparing them with information in the memory of each minicolumn of the cortical zone, and, at the same time, determining a significant context is the information transformation rule. The meaning of information is defined as an interpretation that is close to the information available in the memory of a minicolumn. The behavior is a result of modeling of possible situations. Using this approach will allow creating a strong AI or AGI.

AGI-20

The meaning of things as a concept of strong AI architecture

cluster of receptors

membrane receptors

context processor

cortical minicolumns

contextual semantic

information waves

cerebral cortex

meaning of information

artificial general intelligence

strong ai

semantic memory

dendrites

hippocampus

brain

Colleagues and Friends:

I am very happy to welcome you to the 14th annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, and to the first virtual edition of our meeting. I want to highlight the important work the CAN meeting chair, **Roger Thompson** and co-chair, **Alyson Fournier**, did to put together the great program we are offering this year. Moving to a virtual format required a complete re-design of the program, and both Roger and Alyson did a splendid job in providing us with an appealing and well adapted program for our first virtual event. I wish to thank them for this very important effort.

Highlights of this year’s scientific meeting include invited speakers **Michael Hausser, Franck Polleux, Gwyneth Card, Magdalena Götz**and Brain Prize winner **Huda Zoghbi**. Plenary and parallel symposia, proposed by our members complete our diverse [scientific program.](https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/program-2021/)

The 2021 Advocacy session, chaired and organized by CAN advocacy committee chair **Karun Singh**, will feature a special lecture and question period with Member of Parliament and past Science Minister **Kirsty Duncan**. This will be followed by a short overview of CAN’s advocacy activities over the last year. We invite you to participate in this session for insight from Dr. Duncan on the workings of Parliament Hill, and to learn more about what CAN has been doing to promote neuroscience research in Canada.

We are also excited to host **Lisa Willis** in the Equity Diversity and Inclusion session, organized by EDI committee chair **Jibran Khokhar**.

A special highlight of our meeting will be the lectures by award-winning young neuroscientists. We are please to host the CAN 2020 Young Investigator Award winner **Mihaela Iordanova**, and CAN 2021 Young Investigator Award winners **Aaron Phillips** and **Tabrez Siddiqui**. Highlights will also include presentation by the top three winners of the CAN-CIHR-INMHA Brain Star Award winners, **Claire Gizowski, Nuria Daviu Abant** and **Lukas Tamayo-Orrego**.

Independently organized satellite symposia complement and complete this exciting program, check them out here: https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/2021-satellite-symposia/

Some of the most engaging sessions are always the poster sessions featuring the work of our trainees, so make sure to log in to Gather Town during the poster sessions to chat with the presenters.
We hope you enjoy this program, and look forward to welcoming you, virtually.

Shernaz Bamji

President of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/b9aea25343a87d5aac3b9367dc780974.jpg)



Please head to https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/registration-2021/ to register. 

CAN-ACN 2021

14th Canadian Neuroscience Meeting from August 23rd-25th

technical paper

The AGI conference series is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. By gathering together active researchers in the field, for presentation of results and discussion of ideas, we accelerate our progress toward our common goal.

Underline hosted the two main days of AGI 2020 on Wednesday June 24th and Thursday June 25th. Both days were **live-streamed** and you can read the full program bellow. All presentations are available for a **asynchronous viewing**. All presenters are grouped into panels. You can also hear guest talks by **Ben Goertzel** (SingularityNET), **Valery Tarasov** (Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics), **Tatiana Shavrina** (Sberbank) and **Joscha Bach** (MIT Media Lab). 

The AGI conference series is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. By gathering together active researchers in the field, for presentation of results and discussion of ideas, we accelerate our progress toward our common goal.

This paper introduces the open-source software project, Brain Simula-tor II, simplifying experimentation into various facets of AGI. The software seamlessly marries spiking neural networks with symbolic AI algorithms. It sup-ports a large array of simple neurons (of various models) and groups of neurons collected into “Modules”, backed by custom software. 3D and 2D simulators al-low a virtual entity to move about, have binocular vision and touch, and merge this information with spoken input. Information is captured in a Universal Knowledge Store module which represents information in links between nodes. Continuing development will enhance these capabilities.

New Brain Simulator II Open-Source Software

This paper compares the various conceptions of “real-time” in the context of AI, as different ways of taking the processing time into consideration when problems are solved. An architecture of real-time reasoning and learning is introduced, which is one aspect of the AGI system NARS. The basic idea is to form problem-solving processes flexibly and dynamically at run time by using inference rules as building blocks and incrementally self-organizing the system’s beliefs and skills, under the restriction of time requirements of the tasks. NARS is designed under the Assumption of Insufficient Knowledge and Resources, which leads to an inherent ability to deal with varying situations in a timely manner.

An Architecture for Real-time Reasoning and Learning

Even with the relative ascendancy of sub-symbolic approaches to AI, the symbol grounding problem presents an ongoing challenge to work in artificial general intelligence. Prevailing ontology design practices typically presuppose the transparency of the relation between semantics and syntax by transcendently stipulating it extrinsic to the system, rather than providing a platform for the internal development of this relation through agents’ interactions endogenous to the system. Drawing on theoretical resources from ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, and interactive computation, this work suggests an inversion of the symbol grounding problem in order to analyze how the symbolic regime can emerge out of causally embedded dynamical interactions within a system of autonomous intelligent agents. Under this view, syntactic-symbols come to be stabilized from other signs as constraints harnessing the dynamics of agents’ inter-actions, where the functional effects generated by such constrained dynamics give rise to an internal characterization of semantics broadly aligned with Brandom’s semantic pragmatism. Finally, ludics—a protological framework based on interactive computation—provides a formal model to concretely describe this continuity between syntax and semantics arising within and through the regulative dynamics of interactions in a multi-agent system. Accordingly, this bottom-up approach to grounding the symbolic order in dynamics could provide the conditions for artificial agents to engage in autonomous language design, thus equipping themselves with a powerful cognitive technology for intersubjective coordination and (re)structuring ontologies within a community of agents.

The Dynamics of Growing Symbols: A Ludics Approach to Language Design by Autonomous Agents

There are different difficulties in defining a fundamental concept; it often happens that some conditions are too strong or just surplus, and others are too weak or just lacking. There is no clearly agreed conception of intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. Still it can be significant and useful to (attempt to) elucidate the defining or possible characteristics of a fundamental concept. In the present paper we discuss the conditions of artificial general intelligence, some of which may be too strong and others of which may be too weak. Among other things, we focus upon logic, autonomy, resilience, integrity, morality, emotion, embodiment, and embeddedness, and articulate the nature of them from different conceptual points of view. And we finally discuss how to test artificial general intelligence, proposing a new kind of Turing-type tests based upon the intelligence-for-survival view. Overall, we believe that explicating the nature of artificial general intelligence arguably contributes to a deeper understanding of intelligence per se.

The Conditions of Artificial General Intelligence

Agents are designed to perform specific tasks. The agent developers define the agent’s environment, the task states, the possible actions to navigate the different states, and the sensors and effectors necessary for it to perform its task. Once trained and deployed, the agent is monitored to ensure that it performs as designed. During operations, some changes that were not foreseen in the task design might negatively impact the agent performance. In this case, the agent operator would capture the performance drop, identify possible causes, and work with the agent developer to update the agent design. This model works well in centralized environments. However, agents are increasingly deployed in decentralized, dynamic environments, where changes are not centrally coordinated. In this case, updating agent task design to accommodate unforeseen changes might require a considerable effort from the agent operators. The paper suggests an approach to enable agents to anticipate and identify deviations in their performance on their own, thus improving the process of adapting to changes. The approach introduces an additional machine learning-based component—we call information digital twin (IDT)—dedicated to predicting task changes. That is, an agent would then have two components: the original component, which focuses on finding the best actions to achieve the agent task, and the IDT, dedicated to detecting changes impacting the agent task. Considering general artificial intelligence agents—where an agent might manage different tasks in various domains—the proposed IDT might be a component that enables AGI agents to ensure their performance against changes.

Information Digital Twin—Enabling Agents to Anticipate Changes in their Tasks

I give a brief overview of the theory I have depicted in my paper called "Cognitive Machinery and Behaviours".

Cognitive Machinery and Behaviours

The ability to explain decisions made by AI systems is highly sought after, especially in domains where human lives are at stake such as medicine or autonomous vehicles. While it is often possible to approximate the input-output relations of deep neural networks with a few human-understandable rules, the discovery of the double descent phenomena suggests that such approximations do not accurately capture the mechanism by which deep neural networks work. Double descent indicates that deep neural networks typically operate by smoothly interpolating between data points rather than by extracting a few high level rules. As a result, neural networks trained on complex real world data are inherently hard to interpret and prone to failure if asked to extrapolate. To show how we might be able to trust AI despite these problems we introduce the concept of self-explaining AI. Self-explaining AIs are capable of providing a human-understandable explanation of each decision along with confidence levels for both the decision and explanation. Some difficulties with this approach along with possible solutions are sketched. Finally, we argue it is important that deep learning based systems include a "warning light" based on techniques from applicability domain analysis to warn the user if a model is asked to extrapolate outside its training distribution.

Self-explaining AI as an alternative to interpretable AI

The paper is dedicated to the use of distributed hyperdimensional vec-tors to represent sensory information in the sign-based cognitive architecture, in which the image component of a sign is encoded by a causal matrix. The hyper-dimensional representation allows us to fix the precedent dimension of the causal matrix and accumulate information in it during the interaction of the system with the environment. Due to the high dimensionality of vectors, it is possible to re-duce the representation and reasoning on the entities related to them to simple operations on vectors. In this work we show how hyperdimensional representa-tions are embedded in an existing sign formalism and provide examples of scene encoding.

Hyperdimensional Representations in Semiotic Approach to AGI

We consider a task-oriented approach to AGI, when any cognitive problem, perhaps superior to human ability, has sense given a criterion of its solution. In the frame of this approach, we consider the task of purposeful behavior in a complex probabilistic environment, where behavior is organized through self-learning. For that purpose, we suggest cognitive architecture that relies on the theory of functional systems. The architecture is based on the main notions of this theory: goal, result, anticipation of the result. The logical structure of this theory was analyzed and used for the control system of purposeful behavior development. This control system contains a hierarchy of functional systems that organizes purposeful behavior. The control system was used for modeling agents to solve the foraging task.

Logical probabilistic biologically inspired cognitive architecture

This presentation describes ideas on how to develop engineering tools based on knowledge graphs to manage a systems complexity.

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