Kristinn R. Thórisson (Þórisson) is an Icelandic artificial intelligence researcher, the founder and Managing Director of the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines (IIIM), and a co-founder and former co-director of the Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents (CADIA) at Reykjavik University, where he has been a Professor at the Department of Computer Science since 2004. In 1996 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Richard A. Bolt, Justine Cassell, and Pattie Maes, he authored "Communicative Humanoids: a Computational Model of Psychosocial Dialogue Skills". He was also the co-founder of the semantic Web startup company Radar Networks alongside Nova Spivack, serving as its Chief Technology Officer from 2002 to 2003, with its website Radar Networks Twine becoming one of the first working applications of semantic Web technologies.^[5]

Thórisson is one of the leading proponents of unified theories of cognition, and his research focuses on general machine intelligence—also referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI) or strong AI—proposing a new methodology for achieving machines with general intelligence.^[1] An early demonstration of his constructivist AI methodology was given in the FP-7 funded HUMANOBS project, where an artificial agent autonomously learned from scratch how to conduct spoken multimodal interviews by observing humans participating in a TV-style interview. Called AERA (Autocatalytic Endogenous Reflective Architecture), this goal-driven self-programming system began with only a small set of seed knowledge comprising a few pages of "given" code, autonomously expanding its capabilities through self-reconfiguration and writing the equivalent of thousands of lines of code on its own to perform such real-time TV interviews.^[2] In addition, Thórisson has worked extensively on systems integration for artificial intelligence systems, contributing architectural principles for integrating dialogue and human-interaction capabilities into the Honda ASIMO robot.^[4]

The constructivist artificial intelligence methodology proposed by Thórisson addresses the numerous significant challenges involved in building artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems by replacing ubiquitous top-down architectural design approaches with methods that allow a system to autonomously manage its own cognitive growth.^[1] This involves a shift of focus from the manual design of mental functions to the principles from which intelligent systems can grow through self-organization. The methodology was inspired in part by Piaget's stance towards cognitive development and motivated by the level of operational complexity required for realizing AGI systems, in contrast to what can be achieved even with large teams of human software engineers and software designers relying on manual construction methods.

The constructivist AI approach has been successfully demonstrated in the HUMANOBS project, where a domain-independent AI system autonomously learned real-time socio-communicative behavior through observation.^[3,6,7] The project was funded by the European Union under an FP-7 STReP grant (number 231453).

The constructionist design methodology (CDM) (not to be confused with constructivist AI methodology) was developed by K. R. Thórisson and his students at Columbia University and Reykjavik University (cf. Thórisson et al. 2004, Thórisson & Jonsdottir 2008) for use in the development of communicative humanoids and broad AI systems. The creation of such systems requires integration of a large number of functionalities that must be carefully coordinated to achieve coherent system behavior. Fusing some of the best principles from prior AI methods, including subsumption architecture, modular construction, behavior-oriented design (BOD), and classical AI, CDM presents iterative design steps that lead to the creation of a network of named interacting modules, communicating via explicitly-typed streams and discrete messages.^[3]

In his teens, Kristinn R. Thórisson co-founded the band Sonus Futurae. Founded in 1980, Sonus Futurae published one extended EP (Þeir sletta skyrinu) containing six songs and two singles, which were released in 1984 and 1987. Thórisson revived his musical career 30 years later and has published two 6-song solo albums: the first in 2020 titled "Secrets via Satellite", and the second in 2022 titled "Primate's Delight".

A collection of selected publications can be found on K. R. Thórisson's MIT website.^[9] In December 2012, Thórisson and his co-authors received the "Kurzweil Best AGI Idea" prize for their paper "On Attention Mechanisms for AGI Architectures: A Design Proposal" at the Fifth Conference for Artificial General (AGI 2012) in Oxford, UK.^[13,14] In December 2013, Thórisson and his co-authors received the "Kurzweil Best AGI Idea" prize for their paper "Resource-Bounded Machines are Motivated to be Efficient, Effective, & Curious" at the Sixth Conference for Artificial General (AGI 2013) in Beijing, China.^[15,16] In July 2014, Thórisson and his collaborators received the "Outstanding Paper" award for their paper "Autonomous Acquisition of Natural Language" at the IADIS International Conference on Intelligent Systems & Agents 2014 (ISA-14).^[17] In August 2024, Thórisson and his co-authors received the "AGI Society Award" for their paper "Argument-Driven Planning & Autonomous Explanation Generation" at the Intl. Conf. of Artificial General Intelligence in Seattle, US.^[10,11] In August 2024, Thórisson and his Ph.D. student also received the "Best AGI Paper" prize for their paper "Causal Generalization via Goal-Driven Analogy" at the Intl. Conf. of Artificial General Intelligence in Seattle, US.^[12]

External links include the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines and the Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents. Further links include Kristinn R. Thórisson's MIT page and his Reykjavík University page.