Itamar's possible sabbatical at George Mason ...

Hi Jeffrey,

Hope & assume you're doing well ;)

Once again, thx so much for your ongoing support of the OpenCog Hong Kong project and of my own work in general!!

Anyway ... Itamar (who you surely recall from our meeting at your place in Florida) tells me he emailed you about some help he's seeking, but didn't get an answer. Perhaps you didn't answer just because you're not interested in helping him out --- but just in case you didn't notice his email or didn't have time to read it carefully, I figured I'd quickly ping you about it myself...

Basically he has a sabbatical year coming up and would like to spend it in DC at George Mason University ... his university (U. Tennessee) pays 50% of his salary for a sabbatical year, so he needs to come up with the other 50% somewhere. This would be around US$50K for the year for the other 50%, to be paid to George Mason or UTK or whatever (I don't know those details)...

This interests me because if he came to DC for a year, he would spend his time on his open-source computer vision/audition software (DeSTIN), which now links into my OpenCog framework.... He views DeSTIN as an autonomous approach to human-level AGI, which I'm a bit skeptical of, but I want to use DeSTIN as a perceptual processing lobe within OpenCog, and I've had a student in China (actually a Dutch guy in China for a 6 month internship) working on that for a semester.

He has a nice job there in Tennessee, but doesn't really have any good AGI collaborators there; and I don't really have any good AGI collaborators here in DC. So it would be great for us to get to work together F2F for a year...

So it would be great in my view if he could spend a year in DC working with me on DeSTIN/OpenCog stuff ... basically doing full-time AGI R&D rather than being distracted with teaching & admin etc. I'm spending about 1/3 of my time in Hong Kong helping with the project there, but still the other 2/3 here in Maryland near DC where my house is and my daughter is about to start high school....

The value of computer vision integration, and deep learning for computer vision, is a big topic that I won't dig into in this email, but would be happy to discuss with you at your leisure !!

I'm trying to get a larger AGI initiative started in Hong Kong but realistically for the 2011-2012 academic year I'm very likely going to be in DC 2/3 of the time.... (If the larger HK initiative gets funded then probably I could convince Itamar to move to Hong Kong along with me, and we could have a genuine AGI Research Center there ... but I digress!! ;-)

Anyway I know you have many demands on your time and your available $$, but I figured I'd make the case for Itamar from my own perspective just in case you didn't get his email or didn't grok his situation fully etc....

thanks a lot,
ben