Hi there. I’m Alexey Potapov from Saint-Petersburg, Russia

I’ve been interested in AI since school, where I tried to code AI for games. In 1998, I joined a team of outsourcers carrying out computer vision R&D projects for different corporations (including Daimler Chrysler, LG, Corel, Intel, Samsung, etc.). There were dozens of projects ranged from the forest fire detection to the diamond quality evaluation or vision system for a robotic vacuum cleaner (actually, the world’s second commercial vacuum cleaner with the vision-based navigation). Meanwhile, I started to give lectures on AI/CV/ML in a university and became the youngest professor in the history of this university.
Although I enjoyed AI/CV/ML R&D projects, I have been obsessed with the idea of creating thinking machines since 2000, when I became familiar with the concept of technological singularity. I have been working 8 hours per day on narrow AI at work and 8 hours on AGI at home, but the latter was just a ‘hobby’ (I started with the universal induction, because I actively applied the MDL principle in practice, and became familiar with works of Solomonoff, Schmidhuber and Hutter in 2003; but then extended my interest to probabilistic programming, cognitive architectures, deep learning, etc.). Only in 2012 I decided to make AGI my primary occupation. I started to participate in AGI conferences (which I found the only conference series close to me in spirit), organized AGI courses in two universities, got some grants for relevant projects… But this was not enough to efficiently deal with the problem of AGI.
So, I’m really excited to have a chance to put all my efforts into AGI within SingularityNet. My role here is to gather a team (up to 9 guys; 6 now) to support (or even lead if it will be capable enough :wink: ) ‘core AGI development’. Right now, we have two main direction - semantic perception and OpenCog development (regarding the latter, our goals will be connected to Inference Control for OpenCog, its integration with probabilistic programming, deep neural networks, etc., but we are on an early stage of involvement here). We will be also happy to do (not too much of) more practical work that can contribute to the success of SNet if anyone has some specific ideas.

9 Likes

Hi Alexey! Welcome to the forum, it is so great to have you here :smile:.

You have done so much exciting work already and it is a real win for the team to have you on! We were actually looking into the option of perhaps offering some AGI/AI courses, perhaps we could have a chat one time to see if we could do something there since you have experience in this and perhaps also some content ready… but I will send you an email regarding that :smile:.

If you want we can also post the job position for your team here in the announcements section. Maybe you will attract some talent sourced here :blush:.

Don’t forget to check out and perhaps share some of your insights as an AGI expert in the AGI & Cognitive Science section and AI Algorithms & Structures section if you have some time. I am sure the community would enjoy this very much and could learn a lot from you!

Looking forward to seeing more of you here on the forum!

2 Likes

Great ideas @ibby, I know there will be many people in our community that will appreciate @alexey 's insights.

@alexey I’m very excited to be covering your work on the SingularityNET AI Research Lab!

1 Like

@ibby and @Ryan, thanks!

Regarding AGI courses, this sounds interesting. I abandoned most of my courses in order to focus on AGI R&D for SingularityNET, and I wouldn’t like to give regular lectures, but I can participate in creating an online course. Please, send me an email with your ideas.

Thanks, but this is not necessary. We are looking specifically for candidates in Saint-Petersburg.

I hope, I’ll have some time for this :slight_smile:

2 Likes