Iceland review - 2015, Page 71

ICELAND REVIEW 69
MASTER AND SERVANT
Mica Allan met to talk morals, machines, intelligence and ideas with
Dr. Kristinn R. Þórisson, the managing director of the Icelandic
Institute for Intelligent Machines (IIIM) and Associate Professor of
Computer Science at Reykjavík University, learning what the IIIM is doing
to further robotics and support the police in Iceland.
PHOTOS BY PÁLL STEFÁNSSON.
To a 25-year-old, life before the
internet was an ancient time, right
back there with the dinosaurs. But
in a few decades, the internet could seem
ancient to us all with the development of
artificial intelligence (AI) and the machines
it will spawn. Along with the Googles,
the IBMs and the DARPAs (the United
States Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency) of this world, AI research is being
pursued by academics who spend their days
working on algorithms and robots to shape
and reach the as-yet-unknown destination
that AI will take us to. One such research
lab on the AI journey is the non-profit
Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines
(IIIM), based at Reykjavík University (RU).
BRIDGE TO THE FUTURE
IIIM is Iceland’s first independent research
institute for AI, robotics and simulation, and
brings together leading forces in academia
and industry to foster the exchange of
ideas, inventions and brainpower. Its prin-
cipal partners are the School of Computer
Science and the Center for Analysis and
Design of Intelligent Agents; both based
at RU, and funded through competitive
grants and projects with industry partners,
such as the Icelandic prosthetics and ortho-
pedic company Össur.
Dr. Kristinn R. Þórisson is the IIIM’s
managing director and his background
reads like something from a Dan Brown
novel. He’s pioneered new ideas in commu-
nicative multimodal agents at MIT and has
taught advanced AI courses at Columbia,
RU and the Royal Institute of Technology
in Sweden. He’s also the co-founder of
RU’s Centre for Analysis and Design of
Intelligent Agents. His experience working
in industry has seen him consult for NASA
and British Telecom and he has worked
with Honda on a humanoid robot, as well
as creating the world’s first cognitive archi-
tecture that learns complex skills by obser-
vation and programming itself. In addition,
he sits on the editorial board of the Journal
of Artificial General Intelligence and has twice
won the Kurzweil Award for his work on
AI (Kurzweil is a futurist, inventor and
Director of Engineering at Google, hailed
by Inc. magazine as the “rightful heir to
Thomas Edison.”)
Kristinn started IIIM to help bridge
research in two sectors that operate very
differently in terms of short and long
term research focus. “In academia, a year
is the blink of an eye, it often takes a year
or more to get your work published and
academics think ten years ahead; whereas
industry depends on getting operational
results within two to three years at most.
With an academic timeframe a company
would go under in a year. So there’s this
chasm between academia and industry.”
Having identified this ‘chasm,’ Kristinn is
optimistic that the role IIIM plays, and the
work it produces, will be of valuable service
to the research community in academia and
industry alike.
SCIENCE