SSAISB AGM 2010: Minutes
SSAISB Society AGM
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1.30pm, 1st April 2010, The Phoenix Square, Leicester
Committee Present: John Barnden (outgoing Chair), Mark Bishop
(incoming Chair), Louise Dennis (Secretary), Berndt Farwer
(Treasurer), Colin Johnson (AISBQ), Aladdin Ayesh (Publications,
AISB'10), Fiona McNeill (School Liaison)
1. Welcome
John Barnden welcomed everyone to the AGM. He explained that while he
was technically no longer Chair of the AISB (as of that morning), Mark
Bishop had asked him to conduct the AGM and the Chair would be
formally handed over at the end of the meeting.
2. Apologies for Absence
Apologies had been received from Slawomir Nasuto (Publicity), Savas
Konur (Public Understanding) and Rodger Kibble.
David Peebles, Dimitar Kazakov (AISB'11) and George Tsoulas (AISB'11)
were absent.
3. Minutes of last AGM
The minutes of the previous AGM were circulated and approved.
4. Requests for Changes to the Agenda.
There were none.
5. Chair's report
John thanked Aladdin for organising AISB'10. He also thanked the
invited speakers and symposium chairs for their hard work.
Preliminary figures suggested that the convention had attracted at
least 180 delegates, considerably more than budgeted for.
John welcomed two new members to the committee: Rodger Kibble from
Goldsmiths and David Peebles from Huddersfield.
Slawomir Nasuto from Reading would be taking over as Publicity
Officer.
AISB'11 would take place at York, run by Dimitar Kazakov and George
Tsoulas (the tentative dates were 11 - 14 April).
The society continued to work to expand its interdisciplinary
connections. It had sponsored a prize at the ICCM conference, and had
also been working with IACAP. The society currently planned to
organise a special convention with IACAP in 2012 celebrating the
centenary for Alan Turing.
In the past year the AISB had been much more active about responding
to consultations. It put a response to the REF consultation, the
Royal Society Fruits of Curiousity consultation and to the House of
Commons Committee for Science and Technology. All these documents
were available from the society website. These activities appearead
to have been beneficial in raising the society's profile within
academia.
John then invited Aladdin Ayesh to talk about the Turing Test
Symposium that had been held at the convention.
Aladdin explained that the symposium was intended as a first step
towards a comprehensive intelligence test. It had received some
funding from the Office of Naval Research Global for activities such
as filming, and start up funds for new versions of the Turing Test.
The video material would be made available on the AISB website. There
was also likely to be a paper by Aladdin and Mark Bishop summarising
the way forward and guidelines would be written up describing what an
intelligence test should look like. There were plans for a follow up
symposia in York in 2011 and in 2012 at the Turing Centenary.
Hopefully these symposia would include competitions using actual tests
or even a unified test to bring the whole community together. There
were also plans to look at tests used for child development and animal
intelligence in order to produce some kind of refined test which
measured a scale of intelligence.
6. Membership Numbers
Berndt Farwer reported that the decline in membership numbers and
income had been arrested. He observed that the cost of the AISB
Executive Office basically used up the entire membership income and
all the `extras' such as student travel grants, sponsoring events had
to come from funds or convention profits.
7. Treasurer's Report
Expenditure: The budget for this year expects a large deficit of
around 7,000 pounds. There was a similar budget for 2009 but in the
end the society only lost about 3,000 UKP. Moving all but one
committee meeting to Skype and dropping the number of committee
meetings from 4 to 3 had saved a lot of money.
In 2010 the AISB was committed to two one off costs. A final special
issue of the AISBJ was likely to cost in the region of 2,000 UKP.
There was also likely to be an opportunity to create an archive of
filmed interviews with important people in the AI area. This was
budgeting to cost 1,500 UKP.
Berndt hoped that the better than expected attendance at AISB'10 would
help limit the budgeted deficit.
Looking ahead, the production and postage costs for AISBQ amount to
2,000 pounds. If the society continued to operate at a deficit one
possibility might be to produce AISBQ as a PDF that was emailed to the
membership. No such change would be made without consultation.
8. AOB
John Barnden handed over Mark Bishop who thanked him for his work
over the past 7 years.
