Abstract: Over the last 20 years neuroscience has made considerable progress in a range of areas. Although the brain still contains many mysteries, the fragments of the picture that are now emerging are sketching a fascinating system architecture. In this talk I will present a brief introduction to this and argue that it provides useful design insights for artificial general intelligence.

Dr Shane Legg is a post doctoral research associate at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London. He received a PhD in 2008 from the Department of Informatics, University of Lugano, Switzerland. His PhD supervisor was Prof. Marcus Hutter, the originator of the AIXI model of optimal machine intelligence. Upon the completion of his PhD he won the $10,000 Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Prize and was also awarded a post doctoral research grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Shane is a native of New Zealand. After training in mathematics he began a career as a software engineer, mostly for American companies specialising in artificial intelligence. In 2003 he returned to academia to complete a PhD. His research has been published in top academic journals (e.g. IEEE TEC), and featured in mainstream publications (e.g. New Scientist). All of Shane's publications, including his doctoral thesis "Machine super intelligence", are available on his website: www.vetta.org