Continuing the mission of the highly successful first AGI conference (AGI-08) that was held at the University of Memphis in March 2008, AGI-09 will gather an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in serious scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of artificial general intelligence.

This 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.

The original goal of the AI field was the construction of “thinking machines” – that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called “narrow AI” – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks.

In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of “human level intelligence” and more broadly “artificial general intelligence (AGI).”