At the beginning this month, several of us attended the AGI-14 conference in Quebec City . While attendance was limited, there were a number of excellent talks, and also plenty of opportunity to catch up with others in the AGI community. It was also an opportunity to let everyone know that we're now fully back in the (AGI R&D) game. On the technical side, there seems to be some consensus emerging that bottom-up, 'deep learning' approaches -- which are really hot right now -- are unlikely to, by themselves, achieve abstract reasoning and high-level cognition. Many believe that they will need to be integrated into top-down, 'cognitive architectures' to achieve full-blown AGI. Our cognitive engine may well fill that need some time in the future. On the 20th of September we will be co-hosting a one-day Futurist AGI Conference in Piedmont (East Bay, CA) -- Artificial Intelligence and The Singularity . Should be interesting, and a lot of fun. Hope to see you there! Over the last 6 months we've continued upgrading our AGI engine, focusing on Natural Language parsing, understanding, and learning, as well as inference and question answering. We are quite pleased with our incremental progress. Last week our board met to review current functionality and future plans. We are now targeting a major milestone by early 2016, and to that end we decided to ramp up activities, starting immediately. This means that we'll be hiring additional staff. We're currently looking for additional programmers (junior & senior), as well as 'AI Psychologists' to help us train and test our system. Please see our careers page for more details. We are now on Social Media, check us out on Facebook and Twitter! Towards Increased Intelligence, Peter

