AI researcher Hugo de Garis has accepted a tenure-track Associate Professor position in the Computer Science department at Utah State University (USU), starting September 10, 2001, KurzweilAI.net has learned.
“I will continue my artificial brain work of course, for the next 20 years, corresponding with the “Moore window,” in which Moore’s law remains valid until it hits the atomic barrier around 2020,” de Garis said. “The next-smallest thing to atoms are nuclei –- 100,000 times smaller and requiring energies 100,000 times greater to manipulate. It will be many decades after 2020 before humanity has a true femtotech at the scale of femtometers.

“I will be working on a second-generation brain-building machine using a more evolvable neural net model that I will implement in the latest FPGAs (probably the new 10 megagate chip from Xilinx when it is released). I expect to come out with a new brain-building machine and its corresponding artificial brain every five years. Moore’s law demands this.”

De Garis said he is looking for talented researchers in the fields of electronic engineering, neuroscience, robotics, and software engineering to join him in a team at USU to “build the next-generation brain-building machine and its brain.”

His current URL is http://www.cs.usu.edu/~degaris. His new email address at USU will be [email protected].

De Garis was formerly Adjunct Professor at USU and head of the Brain Builder Group at STARLAB, a research lab in Brussels, Belgium, Europe. The aim of the lab’s “CAM-Brain” project was to build an artificial brain with 75 million artificial neurons, using evolved cellular automata-based neural circuit modules.